tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post7266286775683844422..comments2024-03-19T02:14:31.704-04:00Comments on <center>OnFiction</center>: Research Bulletin: Neuroscience of Narrative EmotionsKeith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-71286875683863816792011-10-06T11:39:01.459-04:002011-10-06T11:39:01.459-04:00Fabio:
Thank you for your kind words! We are grate...Fabio:<br />Thank you for your kind words! We are grateful that you enjoy our site. This is a very interesting study and the RadioLab episode provides a very fair treatment of the results. Well worth listening to. Although not specifically about fiction, it does shed some interesting light on communication and narration, and the idea of brain synchronization when people "get" what we're saying. Thanks for bringing this to our readers' attention.<br />Raymond.Raymond A. Marhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07521492403638340957noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-7912430135582848242011-10-03T13:24:02.890-04:002011-10-03T13:24:02.890-04:00"Art is a human activity consisting in this, ..."Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them." -- Tolstoy, "What is Art?"<br /><br />That Tolstoy's statement seems true -- intuitively so -- I never doubted. But when scientists hook up the brain of a storyteller, map it, and then do the same to the story receiver, what they find is mind-boggling: the same exact regions light up. The first I heard of this was on Radiolab, "Are you my brain double?" (http://www.radiolab.org/2011/apr/18/soul-mates-and-brain-doubles/).<br />The researcher who was interviewed (Lauren Silbert of Princeton) has a paper out (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/07/13/1008662107.full.pdf) which delves deep into the subject, but is somewhat drier than the elegantly sound-engineered radio episode. Nevertheless, through the paper's abstract words shines a fearful symmetry which is awesome to behold:<br /><br />"We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate."<br /><br />Four "activity" in one sentence is hard to swallow, but we get it -- and when we tie the implications of the paper back to Tolstoy's words it almost brings tears to our eyes, does it not? We are, when we deep-read, when we connect, retracing the steps back to the author's original experience, and actually having that experience ourselves.<br /><br />PS: This blog is mind-blogling!Fabiohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09700598057503097520noreply@blogger.com