Your Brain on Literature

Josh Landy
What can neuroscience tell us about novels, poems and movies?

Ray Briggs
Can fiction help us develop real world cognitive skills?

Josh Landy
Can writers exploit our mental weaknesses for our own good?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs, we’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco,

Josh Landy
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about your brain on literature.

Josh Landy
This seems like the perfect subject for you, Ray. I mean, you’re a published poet, and you teach classes on the mind. So this is gonna be a pretty good day for you.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, you might think that, but actually, I’ve got some reservations. I mean, what are brain scans supposed to teach us about literature?

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I think there’s a couple of really interesting studies like, okay, here’s a study, it compares reading for pleasure with careful reading. And guess what? It turns out that tons of extra areas of the brain lights up when you’re reading carefully.

Ray Briggs
Really? And how big was the sample size on that study, Josh? Were the participants all recruited from the same university? Look, a lot of those brain studies aren’t even good science.

Josh Landy
Well, maybe, but not everything in psychology is brain scans. There’s lots of ways that science can help us understand literature.

Ray Briggs
And none of them are any use. Literature is about feelings. That’s the magic of it.

Josh Landy
We can study that magic.

Ray Briggs
Now, what are you talking about?

Josh Landy
Well, okay, think about actual magic, stage magic, right? I mean, modern psychology has given us a real window into how that works. Right? It turns out that what those stage magicians are doing is exploiting weaknesses in our cognitive architecture, like the fact that we can’t pay attention to everything at once.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, what’s that got to do with novels and poetry and stuff?

Josh Landy
Well, novelists are magicians too. Think of all those amazing surprises they pull off, like when they give us a clue, but kind of trick us into paying attention to something else. Psychology helps us see how tricks like that are done.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s good, I guess. But it doesn’t tell us anything about what’s really important. Look, literature is a subjective experience. There’s something it feels like to read Emily Dickinson, and that’s what really matters. And science will never tell us anything about it.

Josh Landy
I mean, I see what you mean. But I mean, don’t you think psychology can tell us at least some important things about reading? One study, here’s another study for you, reading fiction, it turns out makes us better at getting inside another person’s head. Great novels help us imagine what it’s like to see the world from a totally different point of view. Isn’t that a cool result?

Ray Briggs
Oh please, you didn’t need 21st century science to figure that out. I mean, George Eliot said the point of her novels was that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves. And that was 150 years ago. You’re just taking an old idea and putting it in a new hat with a picture of a bar graph on it and a picture of a brain.

Josh Landy
Okay, I see your your hat-based worry. But I don’t think everything’s like that. I think some psychology does more than just redescribe stuff we already know. Okay, here’s another study for you. Turns out, if you want to get readers to care about a character from a different demographic group, the best thing to do reveal their identity late in the story.

Ray Briggs
Oh, wow. That’s what Toni Morrison does, actually.

Josh Landy
Oh, I love Toni Morrison! Say more about that.

Ray Briggs
She does this really cool thing in some of her fiction where she doesn’t indicate right away the race of some of the characters. It’s so interesting to know that that’s likely to make her white reader is more empathetic for instance.

Josh Landy
Right. So am I convincing you at least a little bit?

Ray Briggs
Well, my jury’s still out. I’m still not convinced that science can help us to understand literature. But I’ll grant you that it can inspire literature. Look, there have been some really fantastic novels that explore different kinds of minds. Like “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” about the autism spectrum. Or like “Motherless Brooklyn” for Tourette’s, or like, “Freshwater” for dissociative identity disorder.

Josh Landy
Yeah. Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” for Huntington’s.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I love all of that stuff. I think I feel a poem coming on. There once was a man with a brain-

Josh Landy
That’s great. I’ve gotta count on you, Ray, to finish that by the end of the show. I think it’s gonna be a really fun conversation. Our guest today is going to be neuroscientist David Eagleman, who just did a whole class with me on Literature in the Brain.

Ray Briggs
Meanwhile, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede to find out what researchers are learning about children’s brains on literature. She files this report.

Deena Weisberg
I’m a real big diehard unapologetic sci-fi and fantasy nerd.

Holly McDede
Middle Earth and Lord of the Rings loomed large in Deena Weisberg’s early experiences with fiction.

Frodo
You’re late.

Gandalf
A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.

Holly McDede
As a kid, she was a bookworm, fascinated by thinking about and writing stories. Harry Potter and Star Trek came later.

Hagrid
First, and understand this, Harry, because it’s very important. Not all wizards are good.

Unknown Speaker
Our orders are to intercept, investigate, and take whatever action is necessary.

Holly McDede
When she got to college, she wanted to know, how exactly do authors create amazingly detailed fictional worlds?

Deena Weisberg
How do these black squiggles on a white page suddenly make me think of Middle Earth or Narnia, or something like that? It seems like magic.

Holly McDede
Now Weisberg studies the ways our minds create and think about things we know are not real. She’s a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Villanova University.

Deena Weisberg
My work there is primarily with preschoolers, three, four or five year olds, looking at pretend games that they play.

Holly McDede
And she says kids are actually very savvy about the stories they’re creating and consuming. They know what’s real and what’s not unless adults they trust swoop in.

Deena Weisberg
Santa Claus is our faults as adults. There is a billion dollar industry that is dedicated to getting kids to believe that this fantasy creature is real. And so of course, they’re going to believe that he’s real, because that’s what all the trusted adults in their lives are telling them.

Holly McDede
There are imaginary worlds, imaginary people, and also imaginary friends.

Tracy Gleason
An imaginary companion can take any form you want any time you want.

Holly McDede
Tracy Gleason studies relationships, real and imagined. She’s a developmental psychologist at Wesley College. She also works with young kids, and over the years, she’s met a range of imaginary companions.

Tracy Gleason
Despite the fact that they could change it at will any time and do anything they want any time, they tend to model them after real relationships in a very sort of realistic way.

Holly McDede
Robots, trains and blankets, a shadow, a tiny can of tomato paste, a herd of cows, all different colors. One kid said in preschool, she was friends with an invisible little girl.

Tracy Gleason
But in fact, it was a piece of pasta. She just hadn’t really wanted to tell us that. So she made up a little girl instead of saying that it was actually I think rotini something like that.

Holly McDede
Gleason agrees that children can almost always separate fantasy from reality. And she has a public service announcement. Imaginary friends are not a problem. In fact, they’re a sign a child loves fun, fantasy, and relating to other beings.

Tracy Gleason
Sometimes, in the middle of interviewing a child, and I’ll be asking questions about what companion looks like and what they like to do and this sort of thing. And about halfway through the interview, the child will kind of look at me and say, you know, he’s not real.

Holly McDede
Kids often say this in a whisper, so they don’t want their imaginary companions to hear They’re worried the adults are confused and don’t understand the rules of fictional worlds. Relax, and let the fantasy have a life of its own.

Unknown Speaker
What was that?

Daria
My imaginary friend fell down.

Unknown Speaker
God, even imaginary friends are embarrassing.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for fascinating report. Holly. I’m Josh Landy with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about your brain on literature.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by David Eagleman. He’s a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the Stanford School of Medicine and a prolific author, most recently of “Livewired: The inside story of the Ever-Changing Brain.” David, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

David Eagleman
Great to be here. Thanks, guys.

Josh Landy
So David, you’re a cognitive science superstar. You had a show on PBS, you’ve got inventions on the market. You’ve been a consultant on Westworld. But you’re also a writer of short stories. So how did you first get interested in fiction?

David Eagleman
You know, my father had a great library when we were growing up, and I was up in the mountains in New Mexico. So I had little else to do besides that, but as an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature. That was my first love. And then I went into neuroscience after that. So these have always sort of been my twin loves, which is why it was such a pleasure to teach this course with you.

Ray Briggs
So David, I’m really interested in mental imagery. And I thought as a neuroscientist, you might be able to help me out. So Josh says that when he reads novels, he sees all kinds of vivid images in his head. But I don’t really see anything at all. Can neuroscience explain that?

David Eagleman
You know, this is I think one of the most critical pieces is when we talk to other people and ask them well, what are you envisioning when you read some passage from Thomas Hardy, let’s say. It feels like okay, well, the person says something, but they’re not really good at describing what they’re seeing, because I know what one is supposed to see when one reads this passage, but one of the things science has taught us is that there’s actually a real spectrum of how well we visualize. And so what we now know is that some people are what we call hyperphantasiac, which means they see something like a movie when they read, and other people are aphantasiac, which means there’s no particular imagery, at all, and, and everywhere in between along the spectrum. And so, Ray, just addressing one of the things you were saying at the beginning of the show, about maybe we’ve sort of known all this before because great writers have pointed to these things, the fact is that we all hold a naive intuition that we’re all the same on the inside, but one of the things science can do is measure and quantify this so we have to face the fact and we’re able to measure the fact that we’re all seeing things a little bit differently.

Ray Briggs
So how can we tell the difference between people seeing things differently and people reporting differently on the same mental imagery?

David Eagleman
Yeah, so people have developed these vividness of visual imagery questionnaires, where you’re asked something like, you know, look, picture an ant crawling on a red and white blanket towards a jar of purple jelly. And what does that like to you and you really concentrate on it? It’s like a movie inside? Or is it just sort of propositional logic, but you’re not seeing anything? And you can quantify people on these. And then what my lab did some years ago, is put people in fMRI and brain scanning, and measure what’s going on. And we found a perfect correlation, which is to say, we can actually measure the activity in somebody’s visual cortex, and understand whether they’re running that machinery to visualize it or not, and we can figure out where they are on that spectrum.

Ray Briggs
That’s really cool.

Josh Landy
Yeah, any other things that you think are relevant to this conversation in terms of the differences between us? I mean, difference in our vividness of mental imagery seems like a big one. Are there others that come to mind for you, David?

David Eagleman
Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing is because of brain plasticity, what I call livewiring, we end up being vessels of our own, you know, being a vessel of space and time based on our own experiences. And so the things that matter to me and that move me are going to necessarily be different from those that move you, Josh, or you Ray, because we’ve just had different experiences. And as a result, you know, this, one of the things that’s always interested me when I walk into a big bookstore is that they’re all these different sections, and people tend to gravitate towards one or two or three sections that are sort of their territory, and not every novel is going to appeal to everyone equally.

Ray Briggs
So can I teach myself, like new skills that will help me appreciate more different kinds of literature and which one should I focus on?

David Eagleman
Well, this is something we’ll talk about, but you know, it may be that the other- it goes the other way, which is reading more literature teaches you more cognitive skills, you are able to have a wider view of the world because you are stepping into other shoes, ones that you would not have stepped in otherwise.

Josh Landy
We’re definitely gonna hear a lot more about that after the break. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about literature in the brain with Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman.

Ray Briggs
What do you see when you read? Why do our brains love cliffhangers and twist endings? And how do great writers pull off all their fancy tricks?

Josh Landy
Books, brains and biases along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

When I write the book, I’m going to use every cognitive trick there is. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about your brain on literature with David Eagleman from Stanford University, author of “Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain.”

Josh Landy
We’re finally back in the studio but unfortunately still not taking phone calls. So please email your thoughts or questions to comments@philosophytalk.org or comment on our website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So David, we know that magicians pull their tricks off by exploiting the mind’s weaknesses. Is that how writers do things too?

David Eagleman
Yes, although probably not so purposefully, but you know, the way I see it is, language is extraordinarily low bandwidth. And we don’t always appreciate that. But the fact is that each of us has inside our own heads an internal model of how the world operates and what’s going on out there. And even with, let’s say, the three of us, we’re all at Stanford, we all share so many things in common, but almost certainly, we see the world quite differently, what we take to be reality, who we vote for, what we believe to be true. And so when a writer writes something down, he or she usually thinks, oh, I know exactly what the reader is going to envision or get out of this great paragraph that I just wrote. But the fact is, because language is low bandwidth, the writer doesn’t necessarily know how it will land on different readers. And so this is one of the interesting things that I’ve been thinking about lately is the way that you know, the job of the writer is really just to tickle your internal model, and yours and yours and yours. And what we do is we find writers that we like, because they tickle our internal model in the right sort of way, in a way that works for us. And by the way, I think this has to do in part with visual imagery, which we mentioned before, but given that people are on the spectrum from really great visualizers to not so great, I have a suspicion that, that such readers gravitate towards different writers. So if you’re a real hyperphantasiac person who sees everything, like a movie, you might like Thomas Hardy, if instead you’re aphantasiac, and you’re not really into all the visual details, then you might like Ernest Hemingway instead, because they are feeding the right kind of thing for your brain.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s a great point. And I love your idea of the internal model, you and I’ve talked about these garden path type jokes, or a garden path, as Americans would say, like, for example, you know, the, the pots in the kitchen cabinet, don’t smoke it all at once, and how these, these little jokes seem to-

Ray Briggs
Wait, what?

David Eagleman
So this is this is the notion of the garden path that Josh just illustrating, which is that your brain started going down a particular direction of interpretation, even though once you got the rest of the information, you were able to say, oh, I see actually, I’ve interpreted that incorrectly. But part of the job of the writer, well, let’s say you’re writing a mystery novel, or a thriller, is to just make sure that you’re guiding people the right way, down particular paths. And it’s remarkably easy to do. This is what it has been, in analogy with it with a magic trick, is it’s very easy to give people okay, here’s a bit of knowledge, here’s a bit of knowledge. Great, that’s all you need. And everybody’s gonna go in this direction. And then I’ll surprise them with the plot twist later.

Ray Briggs
Right. And it’s with mystery novels, it’s always seemed kind of too easy to me. Because what you say at the beginning doesn’t actually determine who committed the murder. You just get to decide at the end, and then make it a big surprise.

David Eagleman
Yeah, exactly. It’s not that hard to steer people down the garden path. Because our brains are really all about assumptions, and our in our language is low bandwidth. So look, as Josh said, you know, humor depends on this all the time, like the doctor says, you know, take off your clothes and put them there in the corner next to mine. That’s a garden path joke, because we assume that the doctor has his clothes on. And so we’re surprised by that. But for the mystery writer, it’s just not so hard to drop clues in the right way. So that everyone thinks, okay, I know, I know where this is going. Even though when they look back, they see all the things where there.

Josh Landy
Right, and when you look back, and this is a beautiful theory by a psychologist named Vera Tobin, when you look back, this fascinating feature of our cognitive architecture kicks in called The Curse of Knowledge, which is it basically describes a psychological phenomenon where once you know something, you think it’s fairly obvious, right? It’s much harder for you to imagine not knowing. So when you get to the end of a mystery story, and the murder is solved. You’re like, oh, of course it was so. It’s, of course, the butler did it, I should have known all along, which sort of feeds into Ray’s point, that it makes it much easier for the writer. So what do you think, David? Is this a place where writers you know, can kind of be like magicians where they kind of exploit these sort of weaknesses of our cognitive architecture?

David Eagleman
Absolutely. I think it’s not hard to do. I actually maybe disagree with Tobin a little bit on this, which is I think that the pleasure that we get out of solving the mystery is that suddenly our internal model requires a big update. Suddenly, we thought that this was going on and we realize, wow, there was this entirely other thing going on, and that is actually rewarding to the brain and this is what has made our species so successful is that we, we actually get reward for figuring something out, for understanding, ah I thought this, but in fact that, is really pleasurable to us. And that’s what drives us to understand things in the world.

Ray Briggs
Right, I think something that frustrates me a little bit about mystery, as a genre is that it’s not like a logic puzzle, because in a logic puzzle, you give the clues and they settle what the right answer is, and in the mystery they don’t. So like Murder on the Orient Express, like the novel versus the movie, they have different endings. And each of them feels inevitable. And both of them are compatible with the setup. And so that’s the way it feels like cheating.

David Eagleman
Oh, that’s interesting. You know, I happen to become friends with a mystery writer who has, you know, all these number one New York Times bestsellers. And so he gave me some of his books, and I read them, and they’re actually quite ingenious. And in one of them, you read through the whole thing, and then three pages from the end, suddenly, you realize, oh, the whole, you know, this is the mystery, it’s solved, and then one page from the end, suddenly, the whole thing is turned upside down, and it’s a different answer to the same set of clues and puzzles. And it was, it was very striking and a very effective way of giving you a sort of a double reward of thinking you have figured it out and then realizing you actually hit it wrong a second time.

Josh Landy
You know, I love this way of thinking about it. There’s a really nice theory. I think it’s Matthew Hurley’s theory that humor is basically the reward the brain gives itself for detecting flaws in its own operating system. And I love that, right. All of these literary works these, you know, these surprises or double surprises or jokes, they’re kind of making it- they’re making it pleasurable for us to to learn from our mistakes, which I think is really cool, but we have an email. From Carl in Portland, Oregon, Carl asks about descriptive terms and episodes that build vivid images in readers’ minds. Carl writes, Charles Dickens’ writings with their vivid characterizations and themes are excellent examples of these skills, and also how they all work together in his time to affect social changes. So what do you think, David? Is there a connection between visualization and kind of the impact of a work of literature?

David Eagleman
Look, here’s my opinion on it, is that if you write super visual stuff, it will attract certain readers and turn off other readers. And so with Dickens, or Hardy, or James Fenimore Cooper, or hundreds of others, we can name, they love the visual detail. And they describe the flowers in the scene and the red billowing curtains and so on. And that drives some readers crazy because they happen to be aphantasiac and they don’t love it. But then, you know, then Hemingway writes, I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today, because I’ve learned much about life in these four days. And so, and people think that’s a lot better. I’m not, you know, he’s not being a reporter, giving me all the details of the curtains in the flowers because I don’t care about those. So, to me, this is the most interesting direction in neuroscience is trying to understand the differences between us, which we all assume that, you know, my inside my head is the same as inside your head. And one of the lessons is that it’s that’s not the case, along anything that we mentioned, there’s differences between people.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about literature in the brain, with Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman. So David, I have a question about visual imagery as well, and our focus on visual imagery. Some genres, like particularly poetry, but also a lot of audio genres exploit senses other than vision. So I’m thinking about, like, one of my favorite podcasts is Welcome to Night Vale, where the authors have actually this explicit policy that they never tell you what any of the characters look like, or describe them visually. But the characters had these very rich sort of audio personalities, or like at least auditorily described personalities, it’s mostly, it’s got, like a variety of narrators. So should we be focusing on other kinds of imagery besides the visual?

David Eagleman
Yeah, I mean, what’s interesting, especially for people who have good imagery skills, is that they immediately have in their mind who the character is. Now it doesn’t have to be right, this is just a matter of your internal model. But nonetheless, they figured, oh, yeah, that person looks just like this, XYZ. You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever you know, made a friend over the telephone or something like that, where you didn’t have any information, but nonetheless, that doesn’t stop your brain from cooking up what it what it thinks might be true there. And by the way yet, but but I like this. It’s an important point you’re raising, which is that what we talked about in neuroscience is mental imagery, but that can include vision, audition, I mean, you know, if I say look, imagine some cinnamon wafting over the air. You can imagine the smell or if I talk about, you know, feeling your fingertips rubbing on sandpaper or silk you can have touch imagery like that. Or if I’m asking you think about the birds tweeting, you can have auditory or the taste of feta cheese in your mouth, that kind of stuff. So, so imagery we do in all the senses, it just so happens that we’re very visual creatures. And so a lot of our conversation, a lot of neuroscience study has been on that.

Josh Landy
Yeah, plus, we’re hearing the sounds of the words, one of my favorite studies is a limerick study where they showed that people actually, by default, hear writing in their own accent, which I think is just lovely. We got another email from Larry in Oakland. Larry says, I genuinely hope there’ll be some extended discussion of Stanislas Dehaene’s “Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read,” Got anything to say about reading in the brain, David?

David Eagleman
I’m afraid I have not read his book yet, so I can’t speak.

Josh Landy
Maybe I could say a word? I love his stuff, Dehaene is amazing. I mean, one of the things I got out of it is the notion that when you read, you’re doing what scientists call massive parallel processing, so you’re kind of at every stage, you know, from a curve in a letter to the letter to a part of a word to a word to a sentence, your brain is generating multiple possible interpretations and sort of voting on them, which I think maybe explains the effect of some, you know, special poems that depend on a certain kind of ambiguity, even ambiguities of sound, to generate these kind of ghostly aftereffect meanings or even some jokes, right, where again, jokes can kind of set you off on a path where your mind is generating two or multiple possible interpretations of something. And then, you know, the comedian comes in and sort of finishes you off by sending you a different way. So that’s one of the main things I get from Dehaene, that this, this idea that, you know, the brain is a massive parallel processing machine. And that this can explain some of the best poems in the world. I think that’s pretty cool.

David Eagleman
Yeah, and actually, let me follow up on that, which is, so in my book Incognito, I, you know, built up this theory about how the brain is like a team of rivals, you have all these different networks in the brain, which we can image that all want different things, that are trying to steer the ship of behavior. So you know, if I put some warm chocolate chip cookies in front of you, part of your brain wants to eat that, it’s a rich energy source. Part of your brain says don’t need to get fat part of your brain says, okay, I’ll eat it, but I’ll promise to go to the gym tonight, and so on. You can argue with yourself, you can cuss it yourself, control yourself, contract with yourself, you know, this question of who’s talking to whom? And the answer is, it’s all you, it’s all different parts of you. And so one of the things that I found interesting about imagery in general, is that there is a small literature on this about how we do imagery when we’re reading a character. And some people argue that we, the argument is that sometimes we do enactment imagery. So let’s say, here’s a quotation from an Ernest Hemingway short story. The breeze from the sea was blowing through the room, and he was reading with his shoulders and the small of his back against two pillows, and another folded behind his head. And so the question is, are you inside the person feeling the pillows against your back and so on, and feeling your arm folded behind your head? Are you inside the person? Like enacting it? Or is it you’re watching it like a movie, where you’re seeing the person in the room, but you’re sort of a third party observer to it? And the same question comes up, by the way with speech. So you read a piece of dialogue, do you sort of imagine yourself saying that dialogue? Or do you see it like you’re watching a movie, if someone’s saying it. And there’s some little debate about which it is and how different people have different things, but I actually suspect that we’re doing all of this at once, which is to say, your brain has networks where it’s enacting it and you’re inside the character, and it’s watching it from the outside. And you can actually switch back and forth pretty rapidly, which is to say, suddenly, the sentence goes off in a different direction in your eyes. Oh, yeah, I’m definitely, I’m definitely just watching that one, or I’m definitely inside that character. But the point is, with this team of rivals, I suspect, you know, this massive parallel processing is all going on at once.

Ray Briggs
This one seems like one where there’s a set of traditional writers tricks to cue one interpretation rather than the other one. So things like choice of first person versus second person versus third person. So second person usually like puts me like, right up inside the character’s feeling is and third person feels more distancing. Is there sort of relevant neuroscience on why this is or how this works?

David Eagleman
I think your intuition is exactly right. And the original intuition you said at the beginning of the show, which is that neuroscience wouldn’t necessarily add much to that particular point. But anytime you can do something where you are forcing the person inside of the character, like, you know, he felt the breeze on his cheeks, suddenly, that’s something that’s not so easy to watch on the outside, but you’re, you’re now forced to be on the inside. So I think, you know, even within a sentence or within a choice of which person you’re using, yeah, there’s many ways that we can manipulate that.

Ray Briggs
So we have a related question from Randy in Turlock, California, in fact. So Randy teaches a writing class. And he asked his students to write two versions of the same scene, where one version says just what happened without describing anything. And the other version has to describe something without saying what happened. And so he calls this an exercise in showing versus telling. And he has this guess, that the telling version is going to be processed more by the left hemisphere and the showing version more by the right. And he asks whether anything like this has been tried experimentally using brain scanning. And if so, what patterns have been observed in brain activity?

David Eagleman
Hmm. So I don’t know if anyone has done a study on that. I actually would have a slightly different hypothesis for how that would turn out though. I think a big part of the reason we show don’t tell in literature is because is because it is more interesting, it’s like a little puzzle for the brain to solve about what has happened. So if you’re simply reading a description, it’s like chewing on autumn leaves. It’s not- It’s boring to the brain. But if instead you’re realizing, oh, my gosh, there’s sort of a clue here and a clue here and I put those all together, I realized that there’s some problem happening between this couple, and and they’re about to get divorced. It’s just much more interesting to the brain to solve it for the reasons we touched on before about updating its own internal model. So that’s what I would suspect would be the main difference.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about literature and the brain with David Eagleman, author of “Live Wired: The Inside Story of the Everchanging Brain.”

Ray Briggs
Have novels and poems made you better at understanding other people? Can they help you to understand yourself? Does fiction make the world a more empathetic place?

Josh Landy
Novels on the brain. Plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Which one of us can stop loving those mind games writers like Tolstoy play? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman. And we’re thinking about your brain on literature.

Josh Landy
And we’ve got another email from a listener, Peggy in Arizona. Peggy asks, Does it matter to our brains if the literature is written, oral or film? What do you think, David?

David Eagleman
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I don’t think there’s been too much study on that. There was a study recently that came out of Berkeley that compared audio books to read books. And interestingly, they found no difference in the brain activation. And I think the reason that makes sense is because, you know, when we, when we read a written book, we’re looking at these arbitrary squiggles on a page and we translate that into an understanding emotionally of what’s going on. Same thing, if we hear the book, we’re taking these air compression waves, and we translate that into what matters to us as people. And so this is why it didn’t surprise me too much, that it comes out the same, irrespective of the channel that you shove it in there with. But interestingly, Josh, I know, you know, we presented this study in the class that showed the slide and everyone you know, went crazy about it. There must be a difference! I don’t know why people are so certain that there wouldn’t be a difference, but yeah.

Josh Landy
We should try to replicate, see what happens. What about film? I mean, people often say about film, look, you got this huge screen, and you can have a close up on a face that’s feeling intense emotion. And that’s really powerful. And some people would say, more powerful or more powerful for more people than just reading a scene where somebody is crying.

David Eagleman
Yeah, that’s right.

Josh Landy
Does that sound right?

David Eagleman
Well, that sounds right to me for a particular reason, which is that, you know, I’ve mentioned a few times, we all have our very limited internal model of the world. And what that means is that when we read something, the the storehouse of knowledge that we have depends on our own experience. So for example, if I were to write a novel about, you know, some futuristic spaceship and I’m describing how the things work, you know, if you don’t really care about spaceships or whatever, it’s not something that’s generating a lot inside of you, but visually, I might be able to make something quite extraordinary in the film that, in a sense, teaches you something you had not previously thought about. I’m handing you the visual imagery in a way where you think, oh my god, I would have never considered that. The key about video, of course, is the writer only has two tools, which is what is being shown and the dialogue and that’s it, whereas a writer gets to jump inside of heads, and spend as much time as they want, you know, from behind the eyeballs, talking about the feelings that someone is having, and so on. So it’s, it’s a different toolkit. And, and this is the advantage to write. They have different pros and cons, but, you know, they just have a lot more latitude.

Josh Landy
We’ve got an email on a similar topic still about literature as sort of generator of compassion. This is from John in Granby, Colorado. And John’s interested to know whether, you know, if literature produces compassion, does that effect depend on our reading community? So is it all about just me sitting alone reading a book? Or is it also about conversations that I have afterwards with other readers?

David Eagleman
I think those are separate issues. But you know, hopefully, one would have the conversation afterwards. But yes, the thing about empathy is, you know, we always have this illusion of completeness, which is to say, even though our internal models are extraordinarily limited, we always, at any moment, think we know, you know, everything that we need to know, and we know the truth about things, political opinions, you know, we, our own tweets, are you know, accurate, and everyone else’s tweets are insane, and so on. Because we have these very limited models. But what happens when you read literature, whether you know, whether this is plays, or movies or books or whatever, is you get to step inside other characters’ shoes and live their lives. And it’s extraordinarily useful. And in fact, you know, this is just a speculation. It’s not really an argument. But one of the things that Steven Pinker suggested is that from the advent of the printing press in the late 1400s, the, you know, violence has gone down since that point, he’s not claiming they’re directly related, but he thinks that the spread of literature in our lives increased empathy a lot. And this is part of why violence has gone down in the world, the long moral arc of justice is moving in the right direction, because we’re getting more and more practice at stepping inside each other’s shoes.

Josh Landy
That’s awesome. Because you know, it’s a nice sort of corrective to this problem you talked about earlier, which is that each of us sort of by default, assumes that my world is the world, right? Like the way I see the world. That’s just how it is. And your suggestion, I think it’s also similar to something that Lisa Zunshine, says, a literary theorist that you know, that certain kinds of novels at least, cultivate what psychologists call theory of mind, our ability to step inside somebody else’s shoes and, and sort of think the way they think and feel the way they feel. Do you think, David, that all literature does that, or do some, do some types of literature do it more than others?

David Eagleman
Yeah, almost certainly would be some type more than others. For example, this mystery writer who I recently read, probably doesn’t give that much exercise stretching our brains. But literary fiction tends to be the best at this precisely because it’s jumping inside people’s heads. It’s not just about what is happening, but it’s about what it feels like for those people. And sometimes, you know, you read something, and you hadn’t realized explicitly or not, that people are in these situations, or, you know, because of an illness in their family, or because of who they are as a person or because they’re autistic or what, whatever the thing is, this is what it is like to be inside their heads.

Ray Briggs
Right. So actually, it seems like fiction is very good for getting us to vividly imagine other possibility. But isn’t there a possibility of vividly imagining wrong? So I’m thinking about characters like Shylock, who, on one hand is like kind of pre-sympathetic like he, he gives a very moving speech about how he doesn’t like to have people treat him in ways that are contrary to his dignity, but he’s also an anti-Semitic stereotype, who is like, bloodthirsty and vengeful. And if I thought that all Jews were like, Shylock, I would be making a very serious mistake. How do you guarantee the literature isn’t just having you imagine other people wrong?

David Eagleman
Yeah. Oh, quite right. And that depends on the community of writers that you’re surrounded with. And so obviously, there are many tracks that do present people perhaps wrong, but But you know, you see, you read Shakespeare’s Shylock and then you know, if that were all you had exposure to, probably that wouldn’t improve you too much as a person. But then you read 100 other novels that have Jewish characters , they watch Fiddler on the Roof, and you’re inside this family and it just it feels like a very different thing. You learn from having a broad diet of literature.

Josh Landy
We’re still in the subject of emotional effects of literature, something I think about a lot is, is Richard Lazarus’s experiments where he showed these fascinating results about how, you know, what you feel depends on what you believe. So one of my favorite results is, you know, if you think somebody kicked you deliberately, it hurts more than if you think it was an accident, it actually hurts more, you know, and that made me think a lot about literature and how I read, when I read poems, a lot of the time, it’s to feel better, it’s to feel less of a negative emotion, because you know, what I believe, affects how I feel. Does that make sense from a psychological point of view that some works of literature, you know, help us regulate our emotions?

David Eagleman
Yes, but do you mean just makes sense that, that you gravitate towards literature that makes you feel better?

Josh Landy
Well, also that it works. Like that, at least on people like me, I can read a poem, I feel it, I feel sad coming in. And then once I’ve read the poem, or even just thought about it, it makes me feel a little better.

David Eagleman
Sure. And this is true of not only poems, but anything. Conversations with a friend, it’s somebody else giving you a perspective change. And it’s, it’s precisely I know, I’m repeating myself, but it’s precisely because we’re so locked into our very limited internal models with their illusion of completeness. And we think, okay, I really understand the whole world around me. And then anytime you have a conversation with a friend or read a good poem, you think, oh, wow, that’s a that’s a new perspective on it. And many of these can make us feel better, because we have all kinds of strains where, you know, things are pushed together across different neural networks, where things you know, are uncomfortable or disconcerting, and then we can often straighten things out by just getting a different perspective.

Ray Briggs
So I have one more question about sense modality, which is that so visualization is great if you can see things, but some readers are blind and some listeners to things are deaf. And I’ve seen some really cool like ASL interpretations of songs and musicals, where there’s kind of visual component to the music, do you think that variation in sense of modality is can create sort of new artistic opportunities that wouldn’t be there, if everybody was just the same?

David Eagleman
Sure, that is the case. And you know, it’s interesting, I just reread All the Light We Cannot See, which is a beautiful book, and one of the characters is blind. And so the author does an incredible job of you’re always, when you’re inside her shoes, you’re getting what it is like to be in the world for a person who is blind. Now, interestingly, it’s not so easy to do it the other way, which is to say, if you are born blind or deaf, you can read books, but it is actually quite difficult, possibly impossible to imagine a sense outside of what you can experience. So let’s imagine that I told you that I actually perceive infrared light, or hear in the ultrasonic range or something else. You know, if I wrote a book about that, it’s, it’s actually not easy to understand why I’m having the emotions I’m having and describing, because you don’t know what it’s like to pick up on those things. And so, you know, there’s also, it’s just an interesting thing, that there’s a limitation in what we can envision. The short example of this is if I asked you to, to imagine a new color, it’s actually impossible for you can’t imagine a new color, but there are people who see more colors than you do. Some people are born with not just three types of color photoreceptors but four. But they can’t really describe to you what this new color, what new colors are, because no amount of words is going to explain it to you. So anyway, all this is to say we can we can move in different directions of translating things in different ways. But fundamentally, we’re limited to the senses that we come to the table with.

Josh Landy
Amazing. Well, goodness, I really wish we could stay here and talk about this all day. This is such a fascinating conversation, David. Unfortunately, that’s the end of our time, but I want to thank you for a truly mind expanding conversation.

David Eagleman
Great. Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guests is being David Eagleman, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the Stanford School of Medicine and author most recently of “Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain.” So Ray, how’s that limerick coming along?

Ray Briggs
I think I’ve got one Josh.

Josh Landy
Excellent.

Ray Briggs
Although lit is legit, can you get it through statistics and means analytic. If hardbacks and flicks are magical tricks, then every researcher’s a critic.

Josh Landy
That’s very good. We will put this and links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website philosophytalk.org where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now faster than a speeding neurotransmitter, it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. The term empathy came to us in 1908, meaning the emotions people get from inanimate objects. A picture of a bird makes you want to fly, from aesthetics it migrated to psychology to mean feeling what other people are feeling. Lack of empathy is a characteristic of psychopaths, which we apparently all were before 1908. Before empathy, art was just another way to mark glory. With the advent of literacy, prosperity and cheap paper, art got fuzzy. We got magazine, serialized novels, westerns, mysteries, science fiction books about the occult, Atlantis’ secret history, self help, and on and on and on, and it’s a slippery slope. Robert Crumb was a hippie pornographer. But now he’s an elder statesman, [unintelligible] art form. [Unintelligible] was a pulp writer, but now he’s the guy who taught Hemingway everything he knows. Pulp straddled a no man’s land citing one way or the other on the whims of his audience called fans. One of the byproducts of empathy. Centuries ago was poets who made 14 lines a sonnet, but it was fans who decided James Bond jumped the shark when he swapped his Beretta for a Voltra PPK. And now nobody wants to pay. You get culture online for nothing. More movies we stream, the smaller the audiences get. Hits that used to please 20 million must now settle for four. We watch Fox and nothing else. Cancel culture come screaming across the sky to nuke non diversity. Fiction has been replaced in our affection by nonfiction, hampered by the fact that we no longer know anything. Yes, many of the memoirs we love were made up. So what does it tell you Mr. Postmodern critical guy, or is that doctor? Is that your diploma there in the dustbin of history? See, there’s an example of writing that lodged in our brain, dustbin of history encapsulated the world behind us and the world to come, a clever metaphor, and they became a trope and a joke like network television will soon join Pompeii in the dustbin of history. Does that mean anything anymore? Ask your Roomba who talks like Siri, what’s the dustbin? She will answer gone gone. Dust bins are gone, dumped on the ash heap of history. It’s one of those things that are real, yet not real like a cat scare and a horror movie if you know what I mean. All of which leads me to Bo Burnham’s special Inside which popped up in Netflix this summer. He’s a young guy just turned 30, he gained fame in high school for his YouTube videos and has been famous ever since. Which he talks about along with depression, breakdowns, and what it means to have major bones pretty much virtually the specialist bit of a throwback low rent low res, him at a keyboard. Cheesy but impressive homegrown visual effects. The New Yorker said it is primo output from one of the leading autours of the mediated mind. But Slate ran a review that included confessional meta comedy of this type hasn’t yet developed rules about the obligation to truth. There are many many online comments like that. See Burnham is rich from all the YouTube videos he did. So there’s a lot about that world is inauthentic. Of course Pee Wee’s Playhouse speaking of meta comedy never received this kind of scrutiny. Neither did Meister Jack Benny as far as that goes so that everybody believes a miser and his program announcer and tenor often dropped by his house to say hi liar. But okay, here’s the YouTube millionaire broken hearted broken, broadcasting his cry from the heart and the very dustbin of history that made him famous in the first place with catchy tunes. How does this even work? Well, we put them there one click at a time. We are influencers and social media managers and Ted talk Tiktokers all vying to get that main character energy, to be the stars of our own lives on the couch, waiting to be treated like heroes just because we retained a microsliver of our attention span and delivered it to people like Bo Burnham and now he owes us something. He sees that it’s a celebration. It’s a warning. I feel for the guy, feel his pain. I’m an avant garde confessional medic comedian in my own right and I’m struggling man this keeps up I’ll be selling on the street with a tin cup. Face it aesthetics. It’s a GoFundMe world full of psychopaths trying to learn how to cry. We just live in it. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2021.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research and Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed or misexpressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Josh Landy
not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytalk.org where you can subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening,

Josh Landy
and thank you for thinking.

Bo Burnham
So I’m just gonna sit here and enjoy my 20s and then get back to work.