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What can a writer do to bring a story alive in the mind of a reader? It's not just a matter of saying this happened and then another thing. The way in which a writer prompts the imagination can make a big difference. There have been brilliant advances recently in neuroscience and in literary theory, which give us a sense of what happens in the brain and mind when a writer depicts actions and scenes.
Nicole Speer, Jeremy Reynolds, Khena Swallow & Jeffrey Zacks (2009) have shown how verbal depictions of actions and scenes affect the brain as a person reads a story. Because subjects need to keep very still in an fMRI machine, most neuro-imaging studies of reading have flashed isolated phrases onto a screen. Speer and her colleagues devised a method of presenting words on a screen in rapid succession so that people could remain still while they read a 1500-word short story. The researchers found that when participants read about actions performed by a story character, these participants showed activations in the regions of their brains that are associated with doing that same kind of action in real life. This finding reinforces ideas of mirroring in the brain, a topic of research that has excited a lot of recent attention. Thus, Speer and her colleagues found that when the story said a character "pulled a light cord" there were increases of activation in a region of the frontal lobes that are involved with controlling actions of grasping. They found that changes in characters' locations had different effects. When a character "went through the front door into the kitchen" there was increased activation of the readers' temporal lobes, in regions that are selectively activated when people view spatial scenes.
Elaine Scarry (1999) has studied how famous writers have been able to suggest scenes in the imagination. She has found that some writers, such as Thomas Hardy and Marcel Proust, have been particularly effective in prompting vivid imaginings. To help the reader imagine an action, says Scarry, the writer must depict the action as extended in time, with sufficient detail of what object is acted on, and what the effects are. To depict a scene, Scarry suggests the writer should offer several elements in a way that allows the reader to construct a scene in his or her mind. In another recent study that used fMRI scanning, Jennifer Summerfield, Demis Hassabis and Eleanor Maguire (2010) found that to achieve maximum vividness and the activation of several areas of a core network of the brain involved in imagining the future, three elements need to be presented that could be parts of a scene. An example was the following set of elements: "a dark blue carpet" ... "a carved chest of drawers ... "an orange striped pencil." Using more than three elements did not increase the vividness of the imagined scene, or produce greater activation in the brain's core network.
The imagination enables us to understand others and ourselves, to draw on our past in order to consider possible futures. It's a means by which we can transcend the immediate. Psychological research on imagination has been sparse in comparison with such areas as perception and memory. At last such research is coming into prominence, in a meeting between the psychology of fiction and questions of how we deal with the what-ifs of human life.
References
Elaine Scarry (1999). Dreaming by the book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nicole Speer, Jeremy Reynolds, Khena Swallow & Jeffrey Zacks, (2009). Reading stories activates neural representations of visual and motor experience. Psychological Science, 20, 989-999.
Jennifer Summerfield, Demis Hassabis & Eleanor Maguire (2010). Differential engagement of brain regions within a ‘core' network during scene construction. Neuropsychologia, 48, 1501-1509.
Image: fMRI activation of the hippocampus, an area of the core network of the brain, found by Summerfield, Hassabis, and Maguire in their study of phrases presented as elements for the imagination of a scene (1E means the first element presented, 2E means the second, 3E the third, and so on).
