Comments on: Lighting up your reader’s brain: Can neuroscience teach you to be a better writer?

By: Livia Blackburne

Livia Blackburne — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:33:17 +0000

Bernard — that’s an interesting thought. There are certainly brain responses to errors– different ones for grammatical vs. pragmatic errors. It’d be interesting to see how those affect the rest of the processing.

By: terena

terena — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:19:52 +0000

Fascinating. And a good way to look at using sensory details. I think this will help writers understand the depth of the sensory details they need to use and why. If you can actually make the reader smell the raspberry tea your protagonist is brewing, then you’ve written a great scene.

By: Bernard S. Jansen

Bernard S. Jansen — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:58:04 +0000

Thanks Alan, for another great article.

I think there are some areas of the brain that you certainly don’t want to “activate”. I think we are all “jarred” out of that semi-hypnotic book-reading state when something isn’t quite right (factually, grammatically, realistically, etc). There must be an “analytical” part of the brain that activates at that time. You don’t really want that sort of analysis going on when you (or your readers) are reading fiction.

By: Gail Handler

Gail Handler — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:24:05 +0000

A fascinating topic! As a 30 year elementary school teacher I totally agree. Brain-based research teaches us the importance of engaging children emotionally and physically, as well as both halves of the brain. Now as a children’s book author, it drives me toward expressing more interconnectivenesss within my characters.

Great post!

By: Livia Blackburne

Livia Blackburne — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:02:53 +0000

Tania, that’s a great point, and it really shows how we shouldn’t take the generations of writers and storytellers that came before us for granted. I mean, they didn’t have access to brain scanners or anything, and they figured this stuff out anyways, just by telling stories and seeing which ones worked! In some ways, you could even say that literature and psychology/neuroscience are doing the same thing — they’re both trying to get at different aspects of human nature.

By: Tania Hershman

Tania Hershman — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:37:06 +0000

What a great post – I am a short story writer with a passion for science, and soon to be fiction-writer-in-residence at Bristol University’s science faculty here in the UK, so loved the mixing of the two here! However, the main point, “Make the reader identify with the characters. The closer a reader feels to the character, the more they will empathize with and experience what the characters go through. Events that bear similarities to what the reader has personally experienced will strike a deeper chord with the reader” is exactly what we writers strive to do anyway, in my opinion. While it would no doubt be a publisher’s dream for a writer to possess the secret formula for how to hook a reader in neuroscience terms, I doubt it would be any more profound or mysterious than that written above.

And, thank goodness, readers want different things, different experiences, different types of books – otherwise there would only be one shelf in every bookshop. Science is more wonderful to me for the questions is asks and the creativity that scientists employ trying to delve into the universe than for any kinds of black and white answers some might wish for!

By: Questions Answered this Week, by Lit Agents « Leith Literary

Questions Answered this Week, by Lit Agents « Leith Literary — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:52:12 +0000

[...] LINK DU JOUR DE LA SEMAINE: At the Book Deal blog, publisher Alan Rinzler answers some fascinating questions about writing in light of discoveries in neuroscience. You don’t have to write cyberpunk to appreciate these methods for hacking your [...]

By: Marcia Dream

Marcia Dream — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:10:58 +0000

The fact that reading your book activates a part of your reader’s brain doesn’t necessarily mean that your reader enjoys what he is reading.

It just means that the reader’s brain is active. It would have to be, wouldn’t it?

By: Victoria Mixon

Victoria Mixon — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:59:32 +0000

“We become who we want to be.” Lia, I love this.

I’ve been using this theory in early childhood education—particularly alternative education and handling disclosure among battered children—since the early 1980s. Young children literally become who you tell them they already are.

As John Gardner said, the writer must always maintain the “fictional dream.” This is why showing a story through action, dialog, and description—putting the reader in the scene alongside the characters, as if they were actually there—is more addicting than just telling the reader about what happened. When readers feel they’re actually experiencing a story, it changes who they believe they are.

It’s all about the reader’s personal experience of the story.

Thanks for the great information, Livia! How nice to see you here.

best,
Victoria

By: Lia Grimanis

Lia Grimanis — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:44:28 +0000

Here’s an interesting perspective. In my community work, we work to use the power of our own success stories to help homeless women today to rebuild their lives. We’re a gang of women who are all living extraordinary lives and we were all once homeless.

In an effort to understand what helped us to rebuild, we’ve been looking for commonalities in the strategies that we used to change our lives dramatically. One of the answers took us straight to neuroscience.

When you think of, or engage in new possibilities, it triggers an enriched flow of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter directly related to our reward center. It triggers imagination, energy, ambition, focus and confidence; all of the qualities that we need to be able to suspend our harsh reality and change our circumstances for the better. We call it “possibility thinking”. Art of any kind can do this for you.

Norman Doidge writes in The Brain that Changes Itself that dopamine places the brain in the ideal state for neuroplasticity. This is no surprise to those of us who have lived through the unimaginable and found a way to achieve the life we desired, rather than be bogged down by the damage that trauma and affliction may have done.

If we, as writers, write to inspire and incite new possibilities in people, the effective writer will send the reader on an exploration of new realms. It encourages the reader to dream and, if that dream takes them somewhere they want to go, the dopamine rush literally helps to rewire their brains and boost their awareness and drive to move in that direction. In this way, we achieve what would otherwise be logically impossible. We become who we want to be.

By: Kelly Bryson

Kelly Bryson — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:45:36 +0000

I love this subject. I did a review of the neuromarketing book ‘BUYOLOGY’ by Martin Lindstrom a few weeks ago. There’s a link in the blog to an fMRI of a person watching the trailer for the movie ‘Avatar’. Some conclusions reminded me of common writing advice- have characters talk to each other because relationships are inherently more interesting than personal musing.

http://bookreadress.blogspot.com/2009/10/review-of-buy-ology-by-martin-lindstrom.html

By: Marilynn Byerly

Marilynn Byerly — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:14:52 +0000

It’s another explanation of why the five W’s are important for fiction as well as nonfiction– who, what, when, where, and why.