The Neuroscience of Literature

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”- Alan Watts 

"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." -Albert Einstein

Literature is an aesthetic object that has characteristics of harmony and dissonance, intertextuality and self-reflexive abilities; nevertheless, the personal meaning of a piece of literature is dependent on the reader’s interpretation. How interpretations are biologically produced in the mind of the reader will provide a scientific perspective on what readers have generally reported about the effects of literature throughout history. However, knowing the neuronal procedures associated with literature will not inexorably lead anybody to change the way he or she deciphers. Rather, neuroscience will help explain the vast variability of interpretations for some texts while other texts have simple and straightforward meanings; this has become normal in humanistic inquiry. Neuroscience will not indicate how to settle these contradictions yet its model of the mind as a decentered assembly of neurons has much to say in regards to how and why different writings can play with the brain in such phenomenal assortment of ways. The aim of this project is to offer a neurobiological perspective into the phenomena of literature and provide a neural understanding for the elements of literature such as the effects of constancy and dissonance and how they produce separate interpretations.

Harmonic relationships developed throughout a piece of literature facilitate, test, and shape the aesthetic experience of the work. The consistently developed patterns of theme and motif are a result of how writers manipulate cultural conventions and understandings, and in doing so unifying the reader’s experience. In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy shows the chaotic world of war in all of its fluidity and seething particularity. Tolstoy shows men not only as he wishes them to be, but as they are: chaotic, shrewd, corrupt, yet moral. By refracting reality and creating a fictional meta-history, he leaves little up to interpretation because of how the action of the literature is played out through the lens of his perception. Tolstoy’s congruent literature incorporates the reader by making him/her a “liberal subject” because of the disinterested exercise of imaginative faculty that trusts the author without the immediate rush to judgment. By engaging with Tolstoy’s development of details, the reader participates with Tolstoy in his reflection which creates meaning for the text and produces pleasure.

Since harmony is pleasing, one might expect to find this reinforced by the brain’s chemistry. Neurobiological chemicals, such as dopamine, which induce feelings of pleasure and encourage connection with other neurons, are released when the symmetries of literature are at play and the imagination of the mind gets activated. Although the sensation of reading a harmonious piece of literature is more than a chemical high, the release of pleasure chemicals from the brain’s receptors is consistent with the mental feelings that are caused by the literature’s beautiful syntheses.

Yet, harmony can become habitual so much so that a text could even become banal. Writers can use purposeful dissonance as an integral structure of differences that is strategically opposed to the harmonies it disrupts. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot pushes the brain’s power of integration to the limit because of how he manipulates the reader’s expectations and disrupts harmonies. Although there have been many attempts to unravel the meaning of the play, especially Godot’s name, there is no definitive meaning of the play and even Beckett himself has said that the play is meaningless. However, the ambiguity of the meaning as a product of the purposeful dissonance is the exact meaning, the lack of sense is its meaning. Some writers are simply more particularly intent on disrupting consistency and preventing a lackadaisical formation of illusions in order to prompt explicit reflection. The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky has stated, “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make an object ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.” Thus, the disjunction of a text prompts the reader to analyze and arrange the text in order to give it meaning and with this procedure, a personal interpretation is made.

The literary values of disruption and disjunction are consistent with the decentered model of the brain. The significance of defamiliarization has the value of reviving the brain’s responsiveness and its elasticity against the tendency of particular neurons and specific cortical connections to become fixed through repeated use.  Specifically, the way that opioid receptors (a neurotransmitter that has similar pleasurable effects like dopamine) are structured in the brain facilitates responsiveness to novelty with implications for the literary work. Noting that “the brain is wired for pleasure”, the number of opioid receptors are increased in the rear visual cortex in a so-called “association area” where interpretive connections are made and “visual information engages our memories”. The increased concentration of these receptors in areas of the brain where the brain connects perceptions with memories is certainly key to the pleasure we derive from acquiring new information, and helps to account, at least partially, for the human preference for experiences that are both novel and somewhat interpretable.

The fundamental duality of the brain’s organization, its need not only for coordination and connections to make sense of the world but also for elasticity and adaptability to reconfigure itself in light of new challenges, makes it useful for it to function with literature. The purpose of literature then is to present to us experiences in different ways, some more harmonious, some more dissonant, and thereby to provide us with opportunities to alternate between cognitive modes. Different kinds of literature structure the brain’s fixity and plasticity in different ways, and our capacity to take aesthetic pleasure in different modes of literature is a reflection of this fundamental, neural based variability of the brain.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html

http://www.wired.com/2012/11/human-brain-harmony/

https://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/home.html