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This Is Your Brain on Writing

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In my last post, I described a journey I took to better understand the science of reading and what insights I could gain from it as a writer. I found the topic fascinating enough to keep going.

What about writing? What’s happening in our brains while we produce stories? What could I learn from this to be a better writer?

Writing and the brain

The process of creative formulation and physical writing lights up a whole lot of the human brain. Language, cognition, memory, visual processing, planning and control, and the ability to make associations between unrelated concepts all come into play. The prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, Broca’s area, posterior cingulate cortex, and hippocampus.

A small number of studies have looked at the concept of “story creation” and what areas of the brain might be involved. In one study from 2005 (Howard-Jones et al), participants were presented with a set of three words and asked to create a story based around them while getting a brain MRI. The researchers found activity not just in the brain’s language region but also the region responsible for making associations between unrelated concepts.

In a later study in 2013 (Shah et al), participants were given 30 words, asked to brainstorm a story, and then given two minutes to write during an MRI. The researchers found activity in the region responsible for planning and control during the brainstorming.

Writers are born and made

One can’t consider the brain of a writer without wondering if there’s something different about it that makes that person predisposed to being one.

The popular conception is that writers are born with all their talent, creativity can’t be taught, and inspiration arrives like lightning allowing the mad writer to crank out a great work.

The reality is that while creativity is a function of intelligence, the majority of people have creative problem-solving skills, and the actual skills involved in writing can be taught. Writers do not have to write in a vacuum but can benefit from criticism as long as it is thoroughly constructive. Writing is hard work, and writers have more control over their work than might be felt during the process.

In fact, practice makes perfect, and writing is no exception, as borne out by research suggesting veteran writers have brains tuned for writing. If you’re like me, you’re a better writer today than you were last year, and not as good a writer as you’ll be next year.

In one study led by Martin Lotze, German researchers observed brain activity during the writing process and discovered that brain activity is different between novices and veterans. The brain activity of professional writers is similar in some ways to the brains of other skilled people like musicians or athletes, Lotze concluded.

In short, like a violinist who has to make a lot of racket before getting good, be prepared to grow as a writer by writing.

Writer traits

What else can we learn about how the writing brain behaves?

Fortunately for us, there has been an explosion of psychological research in this area in recent years. In one study, researchers at the University of California attempted to profile the psychology of the creative writer by evaluating 30 distinguished writers over three days in a “live-in” assessment.

They found five common traits: possessed a high intellectual capacity, valued intellectual and cognitive matters, valued independence, had high verbal fluency and quality of expression, and enjoyed aesthetic impressions.

In another qualitative study, researcher Jane Piirto studied writers listed in the Directory of American Poets and Writers. She collected and analyzed interviews, memoirs, and biographies.
She too found five distinguishing traits: high levels of ambition (and envy!), high concern with philosophical issues such as the meaning of life, high levels of frankness and risk-taking, high value on empathy, and a keen sense of humor.

Yes, writers are awesome.

But… they’re also more likely to have certain mental issues.

Researcher A.M. Ludwig compared 59 female writers to 59 matched controls and found the writers suffered from higher levels of depression, mania, panic attacks, generalized anxiety, eating disorders, and drug abuse. Members of artistic professions, he found in subsequent research, were twice as likely to suffer from two or more psychological disorders as people in other professions.

At the same time, it is interesting to note that despite this, writers remain prolific, which is a sign of resilience, health, and strength of ego.

Fortunately for us, writing is also therapeutic. It’s commonly used as a therapeutic tool based on the premise that writing’s one feelings causes emotional trauma to fade along with growing self-awareness and self-development. And it just feels good.

The flow

Now let’s get into the creative process. The process of writing is highly varied depending on the writer, but scientists have attempted to identify the stages in the creative process.
One of the most popular is the Wallace 4-step process: preparation (gather information), incubation (subconscious works on ideas), illumination (make connection between ideas), and implementation (ideas become reality via critical thinking). To which creative frustration may be added (is this story working?).

M. Csikszentmihalyi conducted a qualitative study of creative people, including prominent writers, who described experiencing “flow” during the process of writing. The writers described flow as a state of extreme concentration, challenge, skill, and reward.

SK Perry advised writers on how to get flow going. Be passionate about your project, get feedback, engage in preparation rituals—such as stopping work in the middle of a scene or sentence, allowing you to start again quickly next time—and minimize anxiety about a critical reception for your work.

I think that last one is a crusher—the fear nobody will like what you’ve created—necessitating very supportive and constructive feedback.

One way to get creativity flowing is to become exposed to others’ creative ideas. In one MRI study, 31 participants were asked to come up with alternate uses for everyday objects. Some of the participants were shown ideas of others, which resulted in increased neural network activity and subsequent greater originality.

For writers, this might mean reading the work of other authors, joining writing groups, attending writing conventions, and finding a constructive Ideal Reader.

Writer’s block

Sometimes, creativity doesn’t come easily, and it’s hard to get into the flow. Writers call this “writer’s block.” But is this a problem of producing words, or of coming up with what happens next?
Some writers freeze up at that commitment because of fear or lack of confidence. Again, that sense all this hard work will only lead to harsh criticism.

“Writer’s block is a highly treatable condition,” wrote Dr. P. Huston, University of Ottawa Heart Institute. “A systematic approach can help to alleviate anxiety, build confidence, and give people the information they need to work productively.”

He wrote a whitepaper on how to treat writer’s block. The document was aimed at academic writers, but I think it’s readily applicable to fiction.

Basically, he says if there’s a mild blockage, establish realistic expectations, allow yourself to be imperfect (write a draft), sidestep whatever is blocking you, and optimize your writing conditions. If there is moderate blockage, imagine you are someone you admire writing, talk through your work with a sympathetic ear, write stream of consciousness to prime the pump, or take a break. And if the blockage is severe, consider cognitive or behavioral therapy or imposing a system of negative consequences (such as an app where you have to give money to a charity you hate if you miss a writing goal).

Parting words

“What an astonishing thing a book is,” said scientist Carl Sagan. “It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Thank you for joining me on this journey to uncover the scientific foundation for this magic, which I hope you found as inspiring as I did.

This Is Your Brain on Reading

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A number of years ago, a woman told me that one of my horror novels had made her cry. As a horror writer, I found this music to my ears.

Afterward, I started to think about what exactly had happened there. I typed up a bunch of words that popped into my head as complex ideas, they were printed as abstract symbols, her brain decoded them, and then she felt a visceral reaction.

We take this all for granted, but it’s pure magic.

But it also isn’t magic. Something happens between the writer and the reader.

What are the underlying mechanisms?

This started me on an exploratory journey—a meditation on what happens to our brains on reading and writing, and what insights we can glean from that.

In this first post, we tackle the reading brain.

Reading and the brain

At a basic level, reading involves decoding a string of abstract symbols and translating it into complex ideas. In reality, a whole lot more is going on.

Consider the sentence, “The baker had a kindly face.” Reading something basic like this, we are using the language processing parts of our brains. Notably Broca’s area, which enables production of speech, and Wernicke’s area, which enables comprehension.

Now consider this sentence: “The baker had an open jar of cinnamon under his nose.” A whole different brain area lights up—the primary olfactory cortex, which enables detection of odors. As if we were actually smelling it ourselves.

In a 2006 study conducted in Spain, researchers had subjects read words strongly associated with odors along with neutral words, and then conducted MRI scans of their brains. (These scans are very useful for neuroscientific research because they show relative blood flow in the brain. More blood means work is being done there.) The researchers found that when reading odor-associated words like “cinnamon” and “coffee” and “perfume,” the subjects’ primary olfactory cortex became stimulated.

Now read this: “The baker held the jar in his leathery hands.”

Our sensory cortex just engaged. This was discovered by research such as a 2012 study at Emory University, which found that sensory metaphors like “velvet voice” and “leathery hands” stimulated the sensory cortex—as if the readers were touching something themselves. Cliché figures of speech like “a rough day” and general descriptions like “a pleasing voice” did not.

It goes to show that evocative language awakens the reader’s senses, while clichés and non-evocative language does not.

Our story goes on: “Inspired by the baker, she jogged home and hammered out a first draft on her keyboard.” Reading this, of course, stimulates the motor cortex.

This was discovered in research such as a 2013 study at the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, which found the motor cortex became stimulated when subjects read a sentence describing a physical act, such as, “Pablo kicked the ball.” In fact, the brain activity was specific to parts of the cortex when motion was related to specific body parts.

So what does all this mean? The brain, it seems, 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.

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonists,” said Dr. Gregory Berns of Emory University. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

Theory of mind

Finally, read this: “After she was done writing, she looked around her empty house and felt alone and unloved. She knew what she had to do. She would…”
So, what does she do next?

Think about it.

Have an answer? Good. You just used a whole other part of your brain: the prefrontal cortex that enables cognition, personality, decisions, and social behavior; and the superior temporal sulcus, which enables multisensory processing. A whole lot is going on as networks in your brain used to navigate interactions with other people are put to work.

In 2011, Raymond Mar conducted a meta-analysis of 86 MRI studies and discovered a major overlap in the brain networks we use to understand stories and the networks we use to interact with other people. In particular, interactions where we try to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. This ability to conceive a map of other people’s intentions is called “theory of mind.”
Stories exercise this ability as we identify with characters’ feelings, figure out their motives, and track their intentions. Because of this, reading is not only enjoyable but also biologically adaptive.

“Fiction narratives supply us with a mental catalog of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcome of the strategies we could deploy in them,” wrote Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, author of How The Mind Works.

Besides this, there is evidence reading improves vocabulary, fosters empathy and emotional intelligence, is therapeutic, and changes minds. Combined with the experiences and wonder it offers, reading is simply one of the most enjoyable things humans can do.

Writing for readers

When I think about reading’s effect on the brain, I can’t help but recall one of my favorite quotes from Wonder Boys: “She read everything every spare moment. She was a junkie for the printed word. And lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.”

How do we as writers stimulate the reader’s brain in just the right way? While the science of reading became far better understood just in the last one or two decades, interestingly, writers have known all along. In other words, the research reinforces the basic tenets of story.

Hook the reader’s attention by capitalizing on human interest in danger and surprise. Build a connection with the protagonist quickly to stimulate oxytocin, an empathy chemical in the brain. Challenge the protagonist with obstacles to achieving their goal. If your story has theme, connect the protagonist’s struggle and transformation to the broader world shared with the reader. Use language to produce as sensory and engaging an experience as possible. And take the time to learn craft until it’s internalized and becomes a toolset used as needed.

In a subsequent post, “This Is Your Brain on Writing,” we’ll take a look into the brain of the writer while they’re doing all this.

THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Kim Stanley Robinson’s THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE is a solitary work of genius. It is one of the most eye-opening, brilliant, and simultaneously horrifying and hopeful novels I’ve ever read.

Fast forward a few years from now, and India suffers a heat wave so lethal it kills millions. This galvanizes the world to take global warming due to human carbon emissions as seriously as the vast majority of scientists. At the United Nations, an agency is formed, the “Ministry for the Future,” designed to represent future generations and the biosphere. This hefty novel imagines the challenges they and humanity face in the coming decades, the daunting forces entrenched in their way, and the systemic changes required.

Holy crap, what a powerful, mosaic novel of ideas. A warning: It’s wonky, meaning it’s filled with policy and discussion about how bureaucracies can get policy implemented. It doesn’t have a typical storytelling narrative. The characters come across as real but not necessarily people you heavily invest in; they are vehicles for expressing a much bigger story about the future of life on Earth and whether we want civilization and possibly human life to survive. The read is worth it, but it’s also helpful to have the right expectations going into it.

Robinson covers all the bases, acknowledging that capitalism, neoliberalism (the idea that capitalism, not governments, can solve all problems), and fossil-fuel global economies are engines wrecking the planet, and to address global warming and prevent catastrophic climate change, post-capitalist systems will need to be pioneered. Neoliberals often comfort themselves by saying technology will get us out of the mess we’re making, but Robinson addresses that as well, noting how technology only does what humans want it to do. If there is little will to address humanity’s role in climate change, technology can only do so much. He imagines a new digital carbon currency that rewards carbon draw down, governments finally taking on the 1% and taxing them, corporations adopting the Mondragon worker coop model (which works so beautiful in Spain and other countries) to reduce income inequality and invest workers in their enterprises, fossil fuel burners having to accept the true cost of their product, a new global eco-terrorism war, reducing meat consumption in favor of vegetable substitutes, expanding instead of privatizing the Commons, clean energy, restoring land to wildlife, waves of climate refugees, massive engineering projects to save the polar ice caps, and much, much more. Robinson, who once wrote a brilliant trilogy about the colonization and terraforming of Mars, imagines us doing it to Earth to save it.

It’s a novel of tremendous scholarship that should be required reading by pretty much everybody. Too much conversation about climate change happens online, where people who simply agree with the vast majority of scientists (and their own eyes and common sense) end up arguing with people quoting cranks hired by Exxon, who end up winning by keeping it in debate, like a never-ending filibuster. Like everything else, climate change has become politicized as Left/Right, which is just dumb and proves robber baron Jay Gould’s famous quip that he could always hire half the working class to kill the other half in his defense. As a result, more carbon has been pumped into the atmosphere and more damage done since Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH than all the decades before. As for the planet, it doesn’t care about these debates. Climate change is happening, it’s happening now, it’s going to get worse, and technology and capitalism aren’t going to solve it without systemic change that threatens the very rich sociopaths who would rather show off with flying yachts into near space rather than pay taxes so we can collectively solve our problems. This is problem that should unite everybody in common cause, with the debate focused on what we do rather than whether we should do anything. My kids aren’t going to die for a few rich assholes’ profits.

THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE excited me for its brilliance and ideas but utterly depressed me, as I’m old enough now to be pretty cynical about human nature and what we’re capable of in large organizations instead of individuals. Fixing the problem will be hard work and require systemic change, not just a percentage of the population buying electric cars and LED light bulbs, and people probably aren’t going to be excited about doing what must be done until climate change is bashing down their door, at which point it may be too late. Robinson shows a path out of this, but I don’t share his faith that the global elites will give up a single dollar or ounce of privilege. They think they’ll be in lifeboats when the ship goes down. They are products of a system engineered to maximize profit today, not tomorrow, and bulldoze anything or anybody to do so, with any externalities–pollution, wrecked ecosystems, etc.–everybody else’s problem. Meaning ours. These people (the 1%) own 43% of the world’s wealth, control its financial system, virtually control its governments, and of course can get half the working class to kill the other half. So I’m more cynical than Robinson, though I appreciate his hope and applaud him showing him a way forward.

If you can’t tell, I loved this one and highly recommend it to anybody who cares about the world they live in and humanity as a whole.

WESTWORLD (2016)

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westworldThe HBO series WESTWORLD, based on the ’70s film written by Michael Crichton (and with many similar elements), serves up an amazing story combining action, quest, creation and philosophy.

Westworld is a massive theme park comprised of thousands of androids indistinguishable from human beings. The androids live out scripted story lines, or loops, unaware they are there solely to entertain rich guests. They pleasure the guests, and they die, often brutally, only to be repaired, reset and sent back to their world. Guests can explore, get pulled into the story lines and/or indulge in their wildest desires. The park was created by two brilliant men, Ford (Anthony Hopkins, nailing it as always) and Arnold.

These two men had contrasting visions for what their creation should be. Ford, who rules the park as its god, saw the androids as “tools with a voice.” Arnold, who died mysteriously before the park opened, saw them as potentially sentient life that should be given free will and rights. After a software update by Ford, some of the androids begin acting strangely. They are remembering, memory being a foundation of sentience, and going off their story lines. Meanwhile, the gunslinger in black (the brilliant Ed Harris), a frequent patron of the park who has explored almost every inch of it, is playing a different game. He believes Arnold implanted code, represented by a maze, that would allow the androids to gain consciousness, and all the world he loves to become real. Unlike watching the original movie, I found myself aching to go to this place and lose myself in the game.

WESTWORLD serves up plenty of sex and violence in solid HBO style, making it as titillating a watch as GAME OF THRONES. Even though we know the story lines are scripted and fake, they offer plenty of exciting action, and suck you in. The show is a feast for the actors, who often repeat the same lines but in different context, and act the same scenes but playing out differently due to the influence of a guest. The show starts off in grand style, turning familiar tropes and expectations on their head and letting you know this isn’t just sex and violence but instead something thoughtful and original. There’s plenty of philosophy in the show, exploring questions such as what is life, memory and consciousness, free will, when a gaming experience makes you feel more real than you do in real life, meeting yourself in adversity, and more.

The show isn’t without its faults. Notably for me how far two lab techs go to help an android, the over-elaborate and convoluted late plot development that diffused rather than built tension, and, most important for me, the confusing disconnect with the original movie. There are indications this Westworld is the same as in the movie, complete with a nice Easter egg at one point–an inert Yul Brenner gunslinger standing in the corner of an abandoned laboratory–but it’s never acknowledged. There are hints something horrible happened 30 years ago, which you think is what happened in the movie, but that’s not the case. The fact it’s a remake and not a sequel really threw me off following the myriad subtleties of the plot.

Brilliant series, totally worth a binge watch some weekend, and I’m looking forward to hell breaking loose in the second season.

STORIES OF YOUR LIFE by Ted Chiang

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stories-of-your-life-by-ted-chiangTed Chiang’s STORIES OF YOUR LIFE is a terrific collection of science fiction stories. The story, “Story of Your Life,” gained Chiang widespread recognition after it was adapted for the big screen with ARRIVAL.

Short stories aren’t usually my thing, but I was thoroughly engaged by this collection. Chiang can take a single scientific fact or simple premise and make a deep and thoughtful story about it. My perception was somewhat colored by something I’d heard about him, which is he apparently takes a year to write a single short story. I went into each story thinking, well, this had better be the best short story ever, because wow, a whole year. As a result, the things I didn’t like stood out as much starker, so I wish I hadn’t heard that about him. The dialogue is average in quality, and many of the stories read like science articles presented as dramatic fiction. No matter, I still greatly enjoyed each story. In many ways, Chiang’s stories read like BLACK MIRROR in print–here’s a single technology or premise, now let’s explore its implications completely. But what I like about BLACK MIRROR more is it fully explores how technology interacts with human nature.

Three of Chiang’s stories come to mind as real standout stories for me. In “Tower of Babylon,” the Biblical tower is imagined as a giant tower soaring into the clouds and touching the vault of Heaven. A miner must travel for days to reach the top so he can help hack into the vault of Heaven. What will he find? It is true that “as above, so below”?

In “Hell is the Absence of God,” Heaven and Hell are very real things and angelic visitations common, which strike like natural disasters. After a man loses his wife during one of these disasters and is taken to Heaven, he has to figure out a way to get to Heaven to join her even though he doesn’t love God. This was by far my favorite story.

And in “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” a collection of people at a college campus express their views about “calli,” a technology that denies people the ability to distinguish beauty in faces, allowing people to interact in a different way. The students must vote on whether to make calli compulsory for all students going to the college. The way the two sides of the issue were presented was compelling, and I found myself agreeing with both sides. More than the rest, this story strikes me as the most feasible and a possible future debate humans will actually have.

Chiang’s a talent to watch, and I’ll be buying his collections in the future, though at the rate of a story a year, it’ll be the year 2026. Check out STORIES OF YOUR LIFE for a collection of thought-provoking science fiction stories.