Responses to fiction
Robert Bethune
research is ongoing, on human response to fiction.
When I say "fiction," I don't mean just the experience of reading
fictional material. I'm also thinking of response to theater, TV,
film, video, storytelling, mime, dance, opera and so forth--all the
ways and means of storytelling in ordinary use.
What interests me is the fact that people can and do experience deep,
rich, sustained and authentic emotional response to fiction. In the
course of reading a story, watching a play, or viewing a film, people
often experience emotional responses comparable in intensity, though
different in nature, to those experienced in connection with real
events.
I'm also interested in the fact that people who create
fictions--actors, writers, dancers, singers, filmmakers and so
on--also have these kinds of highly authentic emotional responses to
fictional materials. For example, in the course of rehearsal and
performance, actors can and often do enter and sustain very powerful
and authentic emotional states and states of interpersonal
relationship vastly different than their ordinary emotional states and
relationships and very much influenced by the purely fictional nature
of the story portrayed in the material being rehearsed or performed.
Recent items I've happened across, such as the article in the current
Scientific American on hypnosis, seem to show that recent research is
able to differentiate between neurological events occuring in response
to imagination, hallucination, and reality. There seem to be
fascinating phenomena going on relative to how the brain authenticates
experience, differential pathways by which experience--fictional or
real--reaches those areas of the brain which control emotional
response.
If anyone can suggest psychology or neurology texts that would help me
learn more about this area, I'd very much appreciate it. I have a
pretty good background in psychology and neurology for a layman, but
I'm not a psychologist or neurologist. I am, in fact, a working
theater professional and teacher of acting.
I'll be checking back here on the newsgroup, and I'm also reachable at
rbethune at mediaone dot net.
Many thanks for your time.
Richard Norman
news:3b2b9763.156543359@lakehuron...
This is far from the neurological, but an excellent place to start
investigating the notion of "fiction" is the semiotician Umberto Eco's
book "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods," especially the final
walk: "Fictional Protocols". The notion of "what is reality" -- what
is "fiction" -- what is literary "realism" are very important
philosophical issues.
I believe that an essential aspect of the notion of
"consciousness" is the human species' ability to create
a "fictional" world -- that is, a world that does not arise from
direct sensory and motor experience, but from the abstract
simulation of the same cognitive responses that ordinarily
results from experience but instead are produced through the use
of language. Our "consciousness" then depends on recognizing
ourselves as actors in this inner representation of either the
"real" or the "fictional" world. Clearly this ability has evolutionary
value -- the ability to consider alternative courses of action, play
out their consequences in our minds, and then choose an
actual course of behavior based on our determination of a "best"
strategy. But the ability to create an internal world of fiction has
also tremendously enriched our world -- i.e. literature. Where it
gets interesting is when we fail to distinguish between the
"fictional" and the "real" inner worlds.
But I am sorry to say I don't have a clue as to the proper
neurological or physiological literature. Whoever does respond,
though, please answer to this news group. I would love to find
out more!
Marielle Fois
fiction. The only thing I have read that deals with this matter is a
small chapter in the 1990 edition of Oliver Sacks' ''Awakenings创. A
well known film, also called ''Awakenings创, directed by Penny
Marshall and starred by Robert de Niro and Robin Williams, was made
from this book. In this chapter Oliver Sacks describes, among other
things, how he experienced the training period of the actors, who
were learning how to imitate patients with deep Parkinsonism. In
fact, they were not learning how to imitate, but how to be deep
Parkinsonian. He even started to be concerned about Robert de Niro,
and admitted to have been curious to study Robert's brain activity
while he was acting.
Marielle
RMJon23
though obviously not properly neurosci lit. Another author who writes both
fiction and "non" and who has a Ph.D in Psychology is Robert Anton Wilson. He's
similar to Eco in some ways. He writes a lot about gnosticism/experience, the
brain, effects of advertising, propaganda, Method Acting, magick and ritual,
different forms of media and their effects on nervous systems and societies,
initiation experiences, human ethology, yoga, mathematics, epistemology, brain
machines, various drugs and their effects on society and individuals,
semantics, the role of heretics in history, brainwashing and hypnosis, etc.,
etc., etc.
If you read his fiction, you might get the odd feeling that much of it is
somehow "about" his own previous reading of fiction, and what it "does" or "has
done" to/for him. His writing is often tinged with satirical, ironic, and
surrealist tones, and much of this is conveyed through a liberal recursivity:
the allusion, citation, and play with previous texts.This is perhaps most
obvious when Wilson writes about Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the latter
perhaps the most "writerly" text there will ever be, in the sense that Roland
Barthes uses the term. (Although Wilson would emphasize the gestalten of the
reader creating the text she's engaged with...to some extent. He comes close to
Derrida in this respect, yet Wilson's writing is anything but opaque.) I know
we might say this about most authors, but with Wilson it seems to me we get a
special case.
As far as your topic, I'd say his writings about the phenomenology of reading
and how writers create certain effects might be of interest to you. He's rarely
discussed this directly though; he addresses these ideas by examples
shot-through all his books, even the "non-fic" ones, strange to say.
There's no doubt that Wilson and other authors feel a potent and continually
transforming potential for the reader of fiction. He does not describe how this
happens in a hard neuroscientific prose style, though. Perhaps the closest he
gets to what you're looking for is in his guerrilla ontology manual Quantum
Psychology (1990 New Falcon Pub.) He has also often written eloquently about
the subjective impact of film. See, for example, "Films Open Doors For Me (And
So Does Probability Theory)" in his Cosmic Trigger Vol.2, pp.104-106. He argues
that great films allowed him to experience "virtual reality" decades before the
term was coined. He also compares the phenomenology of film with the subjective
experiences of psychedelic drugs.
In a 1980 interview he described the subjective feelings of his writing process
as "controlled hedonic schizophrenia."
Isomorphic to this tangential response, see the book by philosopher Mark
Johnson and cog. scientist George Lakoff called Metaphors We Live By, if you
haven't already.
I find the subject of your query fascinating too, btw.
-rmjon23 of Los Angeles
This thread originated with the following:
John H
Maybe useful but to be honest I usually cautious about the subject titles at
the above link. You're on your own.
http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/bib/annot.html
Lots of material at the above link but some relevant to your query. You
might want to think about trying psychinfo database, though you need access
to this, probably a good place to look for your material.
Interesting question you raised, may I suggest you try thinking about our
response to fiction in relation to empathy, the need to understand others
point of view (allocentric), so very early on in our evolution (I'll go back
to Homo erectus on this one but strictly probably evident in chimps and
gorillas) we had to create a fictional account of what the other risen ape
was thinking. Hence our response to fiction etc may have its origins in our
need to see into others' minds and know how they are feeling.
So perhaps to consider the case of autism and other neuro - cognitive -
pathologies, studies there might indicate that some individuals simply do
not respond to fiction, at least consciously so (would be fascinating to
know though if there was a visceral response).
Studies of childhood development may be useful: at what age we empathise, at
what age we can begin to see deeply into the feelings of others. A look at
orbito frontal lesions may be useful but that's a big guess.
People are very complicated things, we use every trick in the book to
understand them and still come up short. Maybe that's just the nature of the
universe.
"Art and nothing but art, we have art in order not to die of the truth."
"If the world were clear, art would not exist."
Nietzsche I think.
Hope this helps,
John H.
Robert Bethune <bobbe...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3b2b9763.156543359@lakehuron...
Jim M
> research is ongoing, on human response to fiction.
I don't know the EXACT publication...perhaps it was Nature... but a recent
study was done on music's effect on neo-cortical structures using MIR and
PET technology. Since this is not my area exactly, I have to admit that I
did not give the article as much attention as I would have liked.
Anyway, the gist of the research was that listening to music focuses
activitiy in several areas of the brain. What you propose has interesting
implications, though, and it would be fascinating to see what kind of brain
activity was present while subjects watched plays or read novels or even
viewed works of art.
--
Jim McQuiggin
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he
hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however
measured or far away."
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden