This is Your Brain on Culture

How Stories, Poems, Plays, Movies and Other Arts Matter

Norman Holland specializes in the psychology of the arts. His latest book is Literature and the Brain, available at literatureandthebrain.com See full bio

November 24, 2009

Poets vs. Critics: Different Brain Systems

A group of poets and professors got together and found out that they read very differently. It turns out that the poets are using Broca's area primarily and the professors a higher, conceptual level. Who would have thunk it? Read More

November 13, 2009

Sexting and the City

New Yorkers are sexting. They arrange sexual hook-ups with the speed of light on their cell phones, iPods, netbooks, and all the rest of today's electronic gadgetry. Does this speed mean an atrophy of prefrontal cortex? Read More

September 18, 2009

Your brain on stories (and poems, plays, or movies)

I've wondered for years, and perhaps you have as well, what is going on in our minds when we cry when Bambi's mother is shot, knowing even as we cry that she is nothing but a drawing on a movie screen. We feel fear as Dracula approaches the heroine's bed. Why? We feel glad when Jane Austen's heroine gets her man. But we know all the time that these characters are mere print on a page or light on a screen. Read More

September 11, 2009

Inglourious Basterds and the Brain

The marketing people pitched this film toward the most childish among us and the most childish parts of our brains. But actually this film leads to morally complex issue and, inevitably, complexities in the brain. It's about our fondness for violent revenge fantasies and our (perhaps) disgust when we see them acted out in reality. It's about movies and the way they act as wish-fulfilling fantasies. Read More

August 27, 2009

Obama's Style Problem as Procedural Memory

Obama has a core style that doesn't fit the political setting in which he finds himself. Can he change? Can any of us change our core identity? Or is it so widely dispersed in our brains that we can only play variations on it? Read More

August 13, 2009

Why Don't We Doubt Spider-Man's Existence? (4 and last)

We believe fictions, but not just fictions. We show the same credulity in everyday life all the time, as "lie blindness," and such credulity makes no evolutionary sense. If we can understand why we don't disbelieve fictions, we may be able also to understand why we can't detect lying in life. The answer is, we believe because we aren't acting. We stand still while someone lies to us. It's that simple. Read More

August 6, 2009

Why Don't We Doubt Spider-Man's Existence? (3)

July 31, 2009

Why Don't We Doubt Spider-Man's Existence? (2)

Transported by a film, tv, or story, we believe or at least we do not disbelieve in what we are perceiving even when it is obviously not true. This is totally unadaptive behavior, almost a miniature psychosis. You cannot explain it evolutionarily. People have been using Coleridge's phrase, willing suspension of disbelief, to describe this phenomenon for more than two centuries. It describes very well the feelings we have in situations that Coleridge could never have imagined, like Spider-Man. But to explain the phenomenon, we need modern psychology and neuroscience.

July 24, 2009

Why Don't We Doubt Spider-Man's Existence? (1)

We speak of a "willing suspension of disbelief." When we are rapt—transported is the term psychologists use—in any kind of literary work, we do not doubt that Spider-Man can web himself over tall buildings, that the Three Bears can talk, or that Sherlock Holmes can tell all about people from the mud on their boots. Read More

July 8, 2009

Krzysztof Kieślowski and Correlation/ Causality

Kieslowski may be one of the greatest filmmakers because he is turning co-occurrences into causalities. An experimenter's error becomes the filmmaker's success. Read More

Neuroscience Basics

The human brain has been called the most complex object in the known universe, and in many ways it's the final frontier of science. A hundred billion neurons, close to a quadrillion connections between them, and we don't even fully understand a single cell.

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