David Amerland's Blog: David Amerland on Writing - Posts Tagged "neuroscience-of-writing"
The Writing Brain
It’s no secret that I use the Goodreads blog to talk about writing which makes this space a lab, of sorts, and myself the subject. So, when I Tweeted that I had got sucked into my own book (https://goo.gl/62X7wv) I was being honest despite it sounding weird.
I know you’d think that the writer of the book knows it inside out, has polished its every word and knows exactly what each page contains and on the whole, in a general sense that’s true. At the same time the writer reading the book, as a finished product, months after it was finally finished and sent in to the publisher is not quite the same person who wrote it.
To understand this we need to do two things. First, establish what writing actually is. And second understand that beyond the mechanics of writing there is a neurobiological activity that is linked to its performance.
Writing is a form of communication. The father of information theory, Claude Shannon, stated that: “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”
By using writing, a means of remotely representing a ‘message’ the writer has perceived, the problem of communication is multiplied several fold. A writer isn’t just a writer. He’s an encoder, using semiotics (https://goo.gl/2DS1UI) to distil and encode a message which then needs to be unpacked, decoded and experienced by someone the writer has never met and may be culturally and linguistically, even, removed from him. To make matters even worse the receiver of the writer’s message may not even be in the same timeline as the writer any more.
We know that writing works. So, the problem presented above is academic, at least where Terran writers and readers are concerned. But that leads us to ask exactly how? How is it possible for someone we have never met, who may have even lived hundreds of years before us, in a world technologically and culturally different to ours, be able to touch us with words that paint pictures inside our head?
The clues come from the neuroscience of writing (https://goo.gl/hvcpQU) where the moment a writer’s words resonate with the reader, the neural signature of the reader’s brain is very similar to that of the writer’s at the time of writing. When Jane Austen writes that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” her words light up the same neural centers in her readers irrespective of the time they live in, the gender they possess or the age they are.
While we could argue that a 21st century digital marketer living in downtown Manhattan inhabits a reality that is decidedly different than that of an 18th century lady living in Georgian England the truth is that the picture compiled by our mental connections as different centers in our brain talk to each other makes as much sense today as it did in 1797 when "Pride and Prejudice" was written.
The similarities stem not so much from culture or education or even language, all of which have evolved significantly in the intervening time, but from the simple fact that the fundamental neurobiology of Jane Austen, the person, is pretty much the same as that of any other person walking around today. The way she thought her readers felt about marriage, relationships, security and courting is not significantly different from the way we feel about them today even if we have replaced the courtship protocol of dancing at a ball with swiping right on the Tinder app.
If emotions, feelings and perception are generated through our neurobiology which then gives rise to thoughts, ideas and values how does my opening statement of being surprised by my own writing fit in? We’ve seen that a writer, in order to write, must not only get his own brain under control but he (and I am using the gender pronoun symbolically here, out of convenience) must also understand and mentally structure all the information he’s absorbed. He then must filter that information through the needs of his readers.
In psychology, all this involves the activation of specific mental processes such as mental modelling, mirroring and empathy. The writer’s brain then works not only as a filter through which reality is perceived but a simulation machine that understands what the readers understand and then renders everything through a commonly shared language of word-pictures.
To do that the writer’s brain has to work in a state of excitation. Anaïs Nin alluded to that when she said about writing “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Similarly, Lloyd Alexander commented that “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
Writers create entire rituals that allow their brain to warm-up and reach that level of performance and just like world class sprinters can’t just show up at a dinner party and break a world record in sprinting (they’re just not psychologically prepared for that) so do writers (I surmise, extrapolating from my own experience) can’t just switch on the state of mind that enabled them to write the book they did, when they were in the full flow of exercising their craft.
That makes writing a performance art. Each time it takes place it’s fresh, unique and ephemeral. With the added bonus of a permanent record left behind.
The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions
I know you’d think that the writer of the book knows it inside out, has polished its every word and knows exactly what each page contains and on the whole, in a general sense that’s true. At the same time the writer reading the book, as a finished product, months after it was finally finished and sent in to the publisher is not quite the same person who wrote it.
To understand this we need to do two things. First, establish what writing actually is. And second understand that beyond the mechanics of writing there is a neurobiological activity that is linked to its performance.
Writing is a form of communication. The father of information theory, Claude Shannon, stated that: “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”
By using writing, a means of remotely representing a ‘message’ the writer has perceived, the problem of communication is multiplied several fold. A writer isn’t just a writer. He’s an encoder, using semiotics (https://goo.gl/2DS1UI) to distil and encode a message which then needs to be unpacked, decoded and experienced by someone the writer has never met and may be culturally and linguistically, even, removed from him. To make matters even worse the receiver of the writer’s message may not even be in the same timeline as the writer any more.
We know that writing works. So, the problem presented above is academic, at least where Terran writers and readers are concerned. But that leads us to ask exactly how? How is it possible for someone we have never met, who may have even lived hundreds of years before us, in a world technologically and culturally different to ours, be able to touch us with words that paint pictures inside our head?
The clues come from the neuroscience of writing (https://goo.gl/hvcpQU) where the moment a writer’s words resonate with the reader, the neural signature of the reader’s brain is very similar to that of the writer’s at the time of writing. When Jane Austen writes that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” her words light up the same neural centers in her readers irrespective of the time they live in, the gender they possess or the age they are.
While we could argue that a 21st century digital marketer living in downtown Manhattan inhabits a reality that is decidedly different than that of an 18th century lady living in Georgian England the truth is that the picture compiled by our mental connections as different centers in our brain talk to each other makes as much sense today as it did in 1797 when "Pride and Prejudice" was written.
The similarities stem not so much from culture or education or even language, all of which have evolved significantly in the intervening time, but from the simple fact that the fundamental neurobiology of Jane Austen, the person, is pretty much the same as that of any other person walking around today. The way she thought her readers felt about marriage, relationships, security and courting is not significantly different from the way we feel about them today even if we have replaced the courtship protocol of dancing at a ball with swiping right on the Tinder app.
If emotions, feelings and perception are generated through our neurobiology which then gives rise to thoughts, ideas and values how does my opening statement of being surprised by my own writing fit in? We’ve seen that a writer, in order to write, must not only get his own brain under control but he (and I am using the gender pronoun symbolically here, out of convenience) must also understand and mentally structure all the information he’s absorbed. He then must filter that information through the needs of his readers.
In psychology, all this involves the activation of specific mental processes such as mental modelling, mirroring and empathy. The writer’s brain then works not only as a filter through which reality is perceived but a simulation machine that understands what the readers understand and then renders everything through a commonly shared language of word-pictures.
To do that the writer’s brain has to work in a state of excitation. Anaïs Nin alluded to that when she said about writing “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Similarly, Lloyd Alexander commented that “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
Writers create entire rituals that allow their brain to warm-up and reach that level of performance and just like world class sprinters can’t just show up at a dinner party and break a world record in sprinting (they’re just not psychologically prepared for that) so do writers (I surmise, extrapolating from my own experience) can’t just switch on the state of mind that enabled them to write the book they did, when they were in the full flow of exercising their craft.
That makes writing a performance art. Each time it takes place it’s fresh, unique and ephemeral. With the added bonus of a permanent record left behind.
The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions
David Amerland on Writing
Writing has changed. Like everything else on the planet it is being affected by the social media revolution and by the transition to the digital medium in a hyper-connected world. I am fully involved
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