The Science of Story

The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction

Sean Prentiss, Nicole Walker, Sean Prentiss, Nicole Walker

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350083905
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Categoría: Kreatives Schreiben

Bringing together a diverse range of writers, The Science of Story is the first book to ask the question: what can contemporary brain science teach us about the art and craft of creative nonfiction writing? Drawing on the latest developments in cognitive neuroscience the book sheds new light on some of the most important elements of the writer's craft, from perspective and truth to emotion and metaphor. The Science of Story explores such questions as: · Why do humans tell stories?
· How do we remember and misremember our lives - and what does this mean for storytelling?
· What is the value of writing about trauma?
· How do stories make us laugh, or cry, make us angry or triumphant? Contributors: Nancer Ballard, Mike Branch, Frank Bures, J.T. Bushnell, Katharine Coles, Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, David Lazar, Lawrence Lenhart, Alan Lightman, Dave Madden, Jessica Hendry Nelson, Richard Powers, Sean Prentiss, Julie Wittes Schlack, Valerie Sweeney Prince, Ira Sukrungruang, Nicole Walker, Wendy S. Walters, Marco Wilkinson, Amy Wright.

1

Introduction

Sean Prentiss and Nicole Walker

As professors of creative nonfiction, we—Sean and Nicole—teach students to write creative nonfiction. We ask students to consider scene and exposition, to interrogate the complexities of memories, and to consider time on the page. But, creative nonfiction is also one of the most epistemologically pressing art forms. How can we know what we know? What constitutes truth—fact, experience, or consensus? By the mere act of trying to represent ourselves on the page, have we already begun to dissemble? Has that memory we have turned into “scene” to show our story replaced an earlier, truer memory? What form best reflects a particular experience? Does lyric trump narrative or flashback? Can a hermit crab essay best describe how multiple perspectives reflect a common story?

As parents, we are used to hearing our children say, “But why?” But this question is not only a question that children ask their parents. It is also a question that any good student should ask of their teachers. And our students often ask us that exact question. But what if the teacher doesn’t have the answer? The Science of Story was born out of our desire to understand not only what we should do on the page (and what we should teach others to do) but also why we should do those things.

The Science of Story strives to understand that question of “But why” by examining what cognitive science (the study of thoughts), neuroscience (the study of the brain), and other sciences might teach us about creative nonfiction and about the human experience. Our sixteen writers delve into recent science to learn how science supports, works against, or adds texture to techniques creative nonfiction writers use. These writers tie this science directly to creative nonfiction and offer ideas on how we continue to evolve and grow as effective creative nonfiction writers.

The Science of Story investigates, essay by essay, foundational ideas of creative nonfiction and searches for answers to questions that surround creative nonfiction. These essays examine how creative nonfiction works (and how the human mind works) and offer suggestions on how we can understand and use this science to improve, complicate, or expand our writing lives, our craft, and our teaching of writing.

Each essay uses research to create craft essays that live within the Venn diagram that is the human experience, creative nonfiction, and science. Some essays blend the personal with research, while others highlight how cognitive and neuroscience illuminate how and why we write the way we write. Some others use science as a metaphor to examine our writing and our writing lives. All of these pieces are written by creative nonfiction writers who, either through schooling or personal interest, are deeply engaged in exploring how cognitive and neuroscience work in conjunction with creative nonfiction.

This book, in many ways, serves as a how-to (by offering suggestions for writers to continue to improve their craft), a why (explaining why we might consider doing things, based not on observation but on cognitive and neuroscience research), and a what-if (exploring what other ideas might be possible). All of these craft essays are based upon cognitive and neuroscience but explained through the lens of creative nonfiction.

But this book refuses to be prescriptive in telling writers how science commands us to write. Rather, this anthology offers new techniques (or proves old techniques) while also allowing readers to envision new tools to add to their writing lives. Still, what we are most excited about this collection is that these essays ruminate on what science can teach us about what it means to be writers trying to understand and portray the creative nonfiction world of our lives.

2

Bengal Tiger Moments: Perception of Time in the Brain and on the Page

Sean Prentiss

Creative nonfiction is not just a recording of the events of our lives—car accidents, swooning love, the slow building of a remote cabin—but it is also how we remember, interpret, and re-create these events. We have the great big world out there—of people and places and things—and, completely removed, we have our brains cocooned by skulls. Our brains, literally, are shrouded in darkness. The only way our brains reach past our skulls to experience the outer world is through electrical signals speeding down bundled nerves from our eyes, noses, ears, skin, and tongue to our brains. Without these electrical signals, our brain’s understanding of the world would be less than black.

Through the brain’s processing of the senses, our brains get to live outside of themselves. They get to experience and interpret the larger world. And as our brains experience that outer world, they are forced to perceive time and to use this perception of time to link moments of life into created memories of events. And this is no small thing. Time perception is so important that our brains are born understanding the passage of time. According to psychologist Sylvie Droit-Volet, newborns possess a “primitive” understanding of time and infants as young as one month old react based on the movement of time.¹

And though humans are born understanding and reacting to time, scientists are unsure where the brain perceives time. Most scientists, including Marc Wittman, a scientist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, in Freiburg, Germany, believe that “There is no one area of the brain, or system in the brain, that is solely dedicated to recording the passage of time.” Instead, time related processes are distributed among the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia, among others, and the brain has a variety of “clocks” that handle different types of brain time including millisecond clocks used for rapid reaction, decade clocks that deal with the physical body, and clocks that deal with memory or predicting the future.² Without these clocks, humans could not survive. We couldn’t breathe on a scheduled pattern, eat when we needed to, or sleep enough. We’d misplace or run out of or fall through time and die.

But even though we need to perceive time to survive, and though we could argue that time moves simply enough: one second chronologically lasts as long for me as it does for you—the reader of this essay—still, perception of time can vary wildly. Time can appear to screech to a halt when we’re bored or worried. And, as clichéd as it sounds, time appears to fly when we are having fun. So although time is universal, perception of time is a construct of the brain. And our perception of time’s movement is faulty much of the time. Rather than feeling as if a one-minute experience lasted one minute we often feel as if one minute lasted up to a third shorter or longer.

This faulty perception affects not just our lives but also our writing lives because how we perceive the world around us affects the details we remember and later write in our creative nonfiction. Our nonfiction is most affected by those moments that were so important that they slant our memories. And as we writers realize that these moments are powerful enough to affect our brain’s understanding of time, we can use those memoires on the page by lingering in those rich details to make our essays and memoirs erupt with life.

These richest moments arise from three neurological issues. The first issue is fight or flight related experiences. When we live through high-octane moments—like a first kiss in a kitchen in Wayne, Pennsylvania, or the slow spin of a truck on an icy Vermont road, veering toward a tree—time seems to stretch forever before the two lips actually touch or the truck kisses that old birch.

Why does time slow during fight or flight moments?

It doesn’t.

It only feels as if time grinds to a halt. David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of The Brain: The Story of You and Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, performed an experiment to see if time slows during fight or flight moments. Eagleman had people do unexpected freefalls from multiple stories into a safety net. During this terrifying fall, Eagleman asked his subjects to focus on reading flashing numbers on a perceptual chronometer that showed numbers barely faster than humans can perceive. If time actually slowed during this freefall, the faller would be able to read the numbers on the chronometer; if time didn’t slow, the faller wouldn’t be able to read the numbers. During all the freefalls, not one person could read the chronometer.

Afterwards, Eagleman asked his subjects to “re-create your freefall in your mind. Press the stopwatch when you are released, then press it again when you feel yourself hit the net.” Eagleman found that fallers’ “estimates of their own fall were a third greater, on average, than their recreations of the fall of others.”³ People thought the amount of time they were falling was a third longer than it really was.

Scientists suspect time appears to slow because it is evolutionarily beneficial. In moments of danger—let’s say a tiger enters the room where you are reading this essay, a Bengal tiger with a light orange coat with white and black stripes, ten feet long from his four-inch-long fangs to his flicking tail, nearly four feet tall at the muscled shoulders, and close to 550 pounds. What do you do? Do you quietly notice the tiger and then keep reading? Do you call to your partner in the other room? Excuse me, but do you see the tiger by the door? I believe it’s a Bengal tiger.

No, you run.

You fight for the door.

You race past whoever is in the house with you.

You cower in the corner, too frightened to even move.

Or you use your copy of The Science of Story as a shield and a nearby pen as a knife, ready to fight to the death.

When we experience fight or flight moments, according to Eagleman, “the amygdala kicks into high gear, commandeering the resources of the rest of the brain and forcing everything to attend to the situation at hand.”⁴ Brains kick into a higher gear, Wittman adds, “Because of the threatening situation, I am totally aroused, and my internal physiological processes speed up. And so relative to that, the outside world slows down.”⁵ Therefore, time appears to slow as the brain maximizes the amount of information it accesses through our senses, so we experience a heightened perception so our brains can more intelligently make decisions.

When the amygdala is engaged, not only do our brains work at a higher level, but our memories are also laid down in a way which provides, again, according to Eagleman, “the later flashbulb memories of post-traumatic stress disorder [and PTSD is always born out of fight or flight related moments]. So in a dire situation, your brain may lay down memories in a way that makes them ‘stick’ better. Upon replay, the higher density of data would make the event appear to last longer.”⁶

Fight or flight related writing can be seen in Edward Abbey’s essay, “Havasu” from Desert Solitaire. Abbey spent a day in 1949 wandering down Havasu Canyon, slowly lowering himself down the waterfalls until he dropped off one fall and, Abbey writes:

I hit rock bottom hard, but without any physical injury. I swam the stinking pond dog-paddle, pushing the heavy scum away from my face, and crawled out on the far side to see what my fate was going to be.

Fatal. Death by starvation, slow and tedious. For I was looking straight down an overhanging cliff to a rubble pile of broken rocks eighty feet below.⁷

Abbey finds himself caught on the edge of a waterfall, with a fall to death below and no way to climb out of the pool above. For the next page, Abbey writes about his ideas on how to escape—screaming for help, tearing his clothes into strips, and building a signal fire. Once he realizes those won’t work, Abbey tries scaling the vertical rock wall:

Here I was able to climb upward, a few centimeters at a time, by bracing myself against the opposite sides and finding sufficient niches for fingers and toes. [. . .] Somehow, with a skill and tenacity I could never have found in myself under ordinary circumstances, I managed to creep straight up that gloomy cliff and over the brink of the drop-off and into the flower of safety. [. . .] I...