Speaker 1: Why do brains love stories? How do brains move so
Speaker 1: easily from assessing reality out there to slipping into totally
Speaker 1: made up worlds that you know are made up? What
Speaker 1: do authors of great literature have in common with stage
Speaker 1: magicians and comedians? And what does any of this have
Speaker 1: to do with cognitive shortcuts? Or how the brain is
Speaker 1: a prediction machine? Or Marcel Proust or Tony Morrison or
Speaker 1: Jane Austen, or why jokes always come in threes. Welcome
Speaker 1: to enter cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist
Speaker 1: and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we
Speaker 1: sail deeply into our three pound universe to uncover some
Speaker 1: of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode
Speaker 1: is about why humans read books. I was watching my
Speaker 1: young daughter the other day. She loves to jump around
Speaker 1: and dance and be on the move, but she was
Speaker 1: sitting stock still in the kitchen, staring at symbols of
Speaker 1: strange shapes written on a page, something like hieroglyphics or
Speaker 1: weird squiggles. Now, it just so happens that English is
Speaker 1: the language that I speak and read, so the squiggles
Speaker 1: of that alphabet don't look strange to me.
Speaker 2: My brain has overtrained on them so that.
Speaker 1: They immediately carry meaning, and my daughter, in the last
Speaker 1: several years, has also overtrained on them. But obviously, if
Speaker 1: I were from another place on the planet, I would
Speaker 1: see these only as weird squiggles. Anyway, she was staring
Speaker 1: at these and was obviously transported internally to another world.
Speaker 1: Even though she was sitting in our kitchen, her mind
Speaker 1: was elsewhere. Now this is strange because any neuroscience textbook
Speaker 1: that you read, including my own, will assert that brains
Speaker 1: are all about gathering information from their environment. Your eyes
Speaker 1: are scanning for threats and opportunities in front of you.
Speaker 1: Your ears are listening, your nose is smelling, your skin
Speaker 1: is registering information. All of it is about monitoring what
Speaker 1: is happening around you. And yet it is extraordinarily easy
Speaker 1: for us to stare at these cryptic symbols and be
Speaker 1: transported into completely new worlds. In this case, my daughter
Speaker 1: was in the life of somebody else. Specifically, she was
Speaker 1: on a long trip through space with a cat and
Speaker 1: a monkey.
Speaker 2: That's what her brain thought. At least for the most part.
Speaker 1: It wasn't so aware of the details of the kitchen
Speaker 1: and the sounds around her. Instead, most of the processing
Speaker 1: hardware was busy living in this other world, one which
Speaker 1: had its own trials and tribulations, and, by the way,
Speaker 1: one which doesn't actually exist, but which nonetheless has no
Speaker 1: problem making her laugh and cry and occupy all of
Speaker 1: her attention. So this kind of thing got me wondering
Speaker 1: a long time ago about why it is so easy
Speaker 1: for us to slip into other worlds, and more importantly,
Speaker 1: into other characters' lives and to experience their situation and
Speaker 1: their emotions. So to this point, one of the classes
Speaker 1: I teach at Stanford is called Literature and the Brain.
Speaker 1: I co teach this with a wonderful colleague of mine,
Speaker 1: doctor Joshua Landy, who works in the Comparative Literature department.
Speaker 2: For years, josh.
Speaker 1: And I have both been obsessed from different angles about
Speaker 1: the big picture of how and why stories pervade all
Speaker 1: human cultures, and not only are they there, but they're
Speaker 1: the main thing that characterizes the culture. We are more
Speaker 1: than information gatherers. We are a very particular type of
Speaker 1: information gatherer, and universally, it seems that the optimal way
Speaker 1: to swallow the jagged pill of information is to wrap
Speaker 1: it in story. So here's my interview with my colleague
Speaker 1: Joshua Landy. So, josh you and I have known each
Speaker 1: other for a long time and for many years now
Speaker 1: we've been teaching a class at Stanford called Literature and
Speaker 1: the Brain, and that's proven to be a very popular class.
Speaker 2: Happily people are in thanks to you. Yeah, thanks to you.
Speaker 1: And so I'm you know, I'm a neuroscientist. You're in
Speaker 1: the comparative literature department. But I love literature. You love
Speaker 1: cognitive science, and so that's what's put us together.
Speaker 2: It's been very fruitful.
Speaker 1: So today let's talk about You have a statement that
Speaker 1: you make, which is that cognitive biases, which are all
Speaker 1: the funny things that our brain does when they're taking
Speaker 1: shortcuts and so on, that these are a writer's best friend.
Speaker 2: So let's start there. What do you mean by that? Yeah,
Speaker 2: so you've written beautifully about these quirks of the human brain,
Speaker 2: right that it's constantly making shortcuts because we just don't
Speaker 2: have the glucose, we don't have the energy, we don't
Speaker 2: have the time to be thinking everything through down to
Speaker 2: the last detail. So we have to make little cognitive
Speaker 2: shortcuts rules of thumb to get us through our day.
Speaker 2: And for the most part these were great, But I'm
Speaker 2: gonna and again they get us into a little bit
Speaker 2: of trouble, and sometimes it's fun trouble, right, That's the
Speaker 2: basis of some jokes. Some of these jokes depend on
Speaker 2: tempting the listener into making a certain kind of mistake.
Speaker 2: So it's an example of such a joke, well, one
Speaker 2: of Mike's. It's not particularly funny joke, but it's a
Speaker 2: good example, which is the pot is in the kitchen cabinet,
Speaker 2: don't smoke it all at once. This is an example
Speaker 2: of a garden path joke, or as Americans say, garden
Speaker 2: path joke. What you're doing is you're tempting the listener
Speaker 2: to think that you're saying a particular thing. Well, the
Speaker 2: pot is in the kitchen cabinet. If it's the kitchen cabinet,
Speaker 2: it must be some kind of utensil. But not haha,
Speaker 2: the joke's on you. Obviously that's not what it was
Speaker 2: in the first place. So this is a case where
Speaker 2: you're exploiting a certain tendency on the part of the brain,
Speaker 2: which is to kind of you know, project out into
Speaker 2: the future, to predict things, to fill things in when
Speaker 2: they're not fully given to you, which we need in
Speaker 2: our daily lives.
Speaker 1: Exactly the brain. The brain, of course, there's a prediction machine.
Speaker 1: And that's because the world is so complex, and really
Speaker 1: the art of growing up and the job of brain
Speaker 1: plasticity is to say, ah, okay, this is the likely
Speaker 1: next token, as we would phrase it now in the
Speaker 1: age of llms, but it's to say.
Speaker 2: This is the likely thing that's going to happen next. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You have a good example of a joke, and in
Speaker 2: that vein the doctor joke, Oh yeah, I heard that
Speaker 2: from a comedian a long time ago.
Speaker 1: He said, I went to the doctor and the doctor said, okay,
Speaker 1: take off your clothes and put him there in the
Speaker 1: corner next to mine.
Speaker 2: There you go. And the reason it works as a
Speaker 2: joke is.
Speaker 1: Because we have an internal model of the world and
Speaker 1: all that language, ever is, is throwing small bits of
Speaker 1: data over the transom and we say, oh, I got it,
Speaker 1: I've got this word, I've got the next word. Great,
Speaker 1: I can put together this very rich model of what's
Speaker 1: going on.
Speaker 2: So we never expected that.
Speaker 1: And this is the notion of the garden path, And
Speaker 1: so how do writers exploit this cognitive bias exactly right?
Speaker 2: So that you know, these great riances will often tempt
Speaker 2: you to make certain kinds of prediction, and then they'll,
Speaker 2: you know, pull the rug out of mone of you.
Speaker 2: And sometimes it's in jokes, because often that rule of
Speaker 2: three where you sort of say the first thing, say
Speaker 2: a second similar thing established as a pattern. Now we're
Speaker 2: fully predicting that the third thing is going to be
Speaker 2: the same, and then ha ha, no joke's on you.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's serious. So one of my favorite examples is
Speaker 2: from Madame Bowin. I don't want to spoil too much
Speaker 2: about the plot here, so I'll just say a particular
Speaker 2: unfortunate thing happens, and then a very similar and fortunate
Speaker 2: happened thing happens again. And so by the time you're
Speaker 2: in a third similar situation, you're fully expecting this is
Speaker 2: probably not going to go very well, right, So so
Speaker 2: this can be for humorous effect, but can also be
Speaker 2: for very serious effect. These great riances are setting us
Speaker 2: up to make certain predictions about what's going to come next,
Speaker 2: which they can then satisfy or undermine.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right. So it's used in literary fiction. It's
Speaker 1: also used in genre fiction. Obviously, in any sort of
Speaker 1: mystery book, what or thriller. What the author is doing
Speaker 1: is saying, Okay, look at this, look at this, look
Speaker 1: at this, and he or she is just making sure
Speaker 1: that we make particular kinds of predictions. And then at
Speaker 1: the end they say, ha ha, it's actually this other
Speaker 1: thing that you totally miss because we led you down
Speaker 1: the garden path.
Speaker 2: Which brings me to another cognitiviance that writes this can exploit,
Speaker 2: which is selective attention. So this is of course the
Speaker 2: staple of stage magic, right that magicians I don't even
Speaker 2: I mean I sort of know how they do it,
Speaker 2: but I basically don't know how they do it because
Speaker 2: it's extraordinary. But they're able to exploit the fact that
Speaker 2: our our brains cannot attend to everything at once in
Speaker 2: order to hide things almost in plain sight, like close
Speaker 2: up magic. They're right in front of you, and yet
Speaker 2: you have no idea how they did this thing they did. Interestingly,
Speaker 2: literary writers can do the same thing, and this is
Speaker 2: one of my favorite phenomena in literature, the experience of
Speaker 2: oh my god, of course, and so how do you
Speaker 2: pull that off? Right? How do you pull off the
Speaker 2: experience for the reader or the viewer of Oh my God?
Speaker 2: Of course? Well, essentially you have to put something in
Speaker 2: your movie, in your TV show, in your novel that's
Speaker 2: visible just enough so that the viewer remembers it later on.
Speaker 2: What's an example? All right? So, one of not just
Speaker 2: my favorite novels, but I know your favorite novels because
Speaker 2: we teach it together in our class is Tony Morrison's
Speaker 2: novel Song of Solomon. And I'm not going to say
Speaker 2: too much about the plot here. It's just be a
Speaker 2: very mild spoiler. There is a fantastic scene right at
Speaker 2: the beginning of the novel where you see this guy
Speaker 2: at the top of a tall building with these homemade
Speaker 2: wings on his back, and he's announced to everybody he's
Speaker 2: gonna fly. He's gonna take off from the tower and fly,
Speaker 2: and you're kind of worried that he's not actually gonna fly.
Speaker 2: It's gonna go very badly for him. Meanwhile, somebody's going
Speaker 2: into labor down on the ground, and somebody else expills
Speaker 2: this this basket full of homemade petals and all kinds
Speaker 2: of stuff is going on it's a bright colors, the
Speaker 2: blue wings, the white snow, the red petals, the woman
Speaker 2: going into labor, the man at risk of dying, and
Speaker 2: by the way, somebody's singing a song. Now, this song
Speaker 2: is going to turn out to be very important much
Speaker 2: later on in the novel. And indeed the song is
Speaker 2: in the title of the novel. But I will bet
Speaker 2: you dollars to donuts that the vast majority of readers
Speaker 2: just do not notice the song, or they notice it
Speaker 2: just enough that when it comes back towards the end
Speaker 2: of the novel, they're like, oh my god, that song.
Speaker 2: But it's hidden in plain sight because you're attending to
Speaker 2: this potential death, and you're attending to the birth, and
Speaker 2: you're attending to the spilling of the petals and the
Speaker 2: colors and everything else. Brilliant. It's a kind of genius
Speaker 2: move on the part of Tony Morris. Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 1: And just to flesh out of this idea of selective attention,
Speaker 1: you know, let's let's take visual attention.
Speaker 2: It's like a little spotlight and you.
Speaker 1: Can make it narrow or you can make it slightly wider,
Speaker 1: but everything outside of your field of attention you just
Speaker 1: completely miss and hence all these things. Everyone's seen these
Speaker 1: on the internet. At this, you know, inattentional blindness, where
Speaker 1: you're trying, you're paying attention to something and as a
Speaker 1: result of that, you don't see something else, like the
Speaker 1: guy in the gorilla suit who walks in and beats
Speaker 1: his chest. So, and of course this is why it
Speaker 1: works with magic, because the magician does something.
Speaker 2: You know, magicians do this thing.
Speaker 1: Instead of moving their hands and straight lines, they typically
Speaker 1: do it in a curve. And I don't know, this
Speaker 1: is just something they picked up on a while ago
Speaker 1: that you just can't help but watch if someone's hand
Speaker 1: does something, you think, hey, that hand is up to something,
Speaker 1: and your.
Speaker 2: Attention goes to that.
Speaker 1: Even if your eyeballs are watching the thing they're supposed
Speaker 1: to be watching, your attention is on the hand moving.
Speaker 1: And so then the magician can do whatever they want
Speaker 1: outside of your field of attention. And so this is
Speaker 1: indeed related to the garden path issue because the writer
Speaker 1: gets to drop clues on things, but just so long
Speaker 1: as making sure that your attention is elsewhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, good.
Speaker 1: So these are things that neuroscientists have been studying for
Speaker 1: a long time and novelists have been exploiting presumably for
Speaker 1: much longer that neuroscientists have been studying this.
Speaker 2: That is right, and that's an important point, right. The
Speaker 2: thought is not that, you know, Shakespeare gotten a time
Speaker 2: machine and traveled to the twentieth or twenty first century
Speaker 2: and read a bunch of cogni science. No, but you know,
Speaker 2: honests tend to work great art sent to work intuitively.
Speaker 2: They have this intuitive sense of what's gonna land. How
Speaker 2: obviously the same it's the stage magicians. Stage magic's been
Speaker 2: around for a very long time. It got a kind
Speaker 2: of you know, it entered its sort of modern phase
Speaker 2: in the nineteenth century with people like Udin long name,
Speaker 2: but that's Houdini named himself after this guy, and he
Speaker 2: was he was the first one to really transform into
Speaker 2: something kind of professional where he wasn't pretending to summon spirits.
Speaker 2: He called his tricks experiments as though he were a scientist.
Speaker 2: Wow magician. So anyway, this is a kind of digression
Speaker 2: into something that I'm excited about, but it's not totally
Speaker 2: on topic. But the main point is all of these
Speaker 2: folks have this intuitive sense, based on experience of how
Speaker 2: you get things to land. In a certain way, and
Speaker 2: now we have all these wonderful scientists like you who
Speaker 2: are explaining why they got it right.
Speaker 1: You know, it makes me wonder when magicians, let's say
Speaker 1: a thousand years ago, performing to the king and maybe
Speaker 1: summoning spirits, whatever they were doing.
Speaker 2: But it makes me wonder what vocabulary they used among
Speaker 2: one another?
Speaker 1: Did they talk about the spotlight of attention in some way?
Speaker 1: Did they intuit the mechanism as much as the what
Speaker 1: to do about it?
Speaker 2: I mean, we don't have all the records of what
Speaker 2: we would need for that, especially as magicians keep diffe.
Speaker 2: It's interesting wonder about.
Speaker 1: Authors though, Let's say a thousand years ago, an author
Speaker 1: who dropped clues over here but wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: the audience's tension was over there.
Speaker 2: I wonder how they described.
Speaker 1: That when they, let's say, taught small seminar classes to
Speaker 1: other authors, how do they talk about it?
Speaker 2: So we don't have those records, but it's very interesting
Speaker 2: to read what people are saying, you know, in the
Speaker 2: late nineteth century, early twentieth century, because that we have
Speaker 2: a bunch of people's letters, and we have people's essays,
Speaker 2: and you know, one of my Favorites is an essay
Speaker 2: by my favorite novelist, Marcel Proust, author of the three
Speaker 2: thousand page be Off in Search of Lost Time. Have
Speaker 2: you read the whole thing? Oh? Yeah, many times? Wow?
Speaker 2: How long does it take you to go through the
Speaker 2: first time? It took me seven years. Yeah, it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's an investment. But that's well, that's part of what
Speaker 2: you and I think about in the classes. You know,
Speaker 2: why do we make those investments? And it's not just
Speaker 2: for entertainment, and it's not irrational, it's completely irrational where
Speaker 2: there are huge benefits that we get from the time
Speaker 2: that we spend in our loving engagement with novels and
Speaker 2: TV shows and movies that are that are challenging, not
Speaker 2: just the ones that wear cars blow up. But to
Speaker 2: go back to your question, you know, Pruce writes this
Speaker 2: essay on Flaubert, the nineteenth century novelist, and he says,
Speaker 2: you know, you're My favorite line in Flaubert is he
Speaker 2: traveled two words sentence. It's a two words sentence, and
Speaker 2: what Prusce loves about it is the use of verb tense,
Speaker 2: so that this novel that is talking about by Flaubert, sorry,
Speaker 2: sentimental education suddenly shifts from this kind of gradual imperfect
Speaker 2: tense where things are kind of moving slowly and you
Speaker 2: have maybe one hundred pages for an afternoon to this
Speaker 2: He traveled, where you're compressing ten years into two words. Oh,
Speaker 2: so you have these really interesting instances of writing just
Speaker 2: talking about their craft, and they will talk about things
Speaker 2: like that. They will say, you know, think about the
Speaker 2: verb tenses using think about the way in which you're
Speaker 2: handling time. Think about the point of view in the
Speaker 2: novel and how it can shift, and how you can
Speaker 2: trick the reader. I mean, that's a big thing in Flaubert,
Speaker 2: and also in Jane Austen, tricking the She doesn't we
Speaker 2: don't have the as far as I know, the records
Speaker 2: of her talking about this, but it's clear in Flaubert
Speaker 2: these writers are deliberately tricking us. They are tricking us
Speaker 2: into thinking that some sequence of words is said to
Speaker 2: you by the author and a ratre and it's just true,
Speaker 2: when in reality it's actually just somebody's point of view.
Speaker 2: And this turns out to be really good for us,
Speaker 2: And why do you think it's good for us? So
Speaker 2: this is another way in which, you know, I think
Speaker 2: writers can in a salutary way exploit the frailties of
Speaker 2: our cognitive apparatus, right, so why is it good for us?
Speaker 2: You know, we encounter some kind of claim in a
Speaker 2: work of fiction. A good example in Jane Austen's Pride
Speaker 2: and Prejudice. There's a scene where this I borrow from
Speaker 2: my friend and colleague Nnie Anderson. There's this scene where
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Bennett is looking talking to mister Darcy, and everyone
Speaker 2: will remember this from the novel of the Fantastic TV adaptation,
Speaker 2: and she's talking to about this, this horrible situation with
Speaker 2: her sister, and everyone's afraid of it and afraid what's
Speaker 2: going to happen? And Darcy says something, and then the
Speaker 2: line is a deeper shape of auteur spread across his features. Oh,
Speaker 2: he's even more arrogant and supercilious than he ever was before.
Speaker 2: He's disgusted. What a horrible family. These guys are trailer trash.
Speaker 2: You know what am I getting myself involved in? Turns
Speaker 2: out much later than the novel, It wasn't out at all.
Speaker 2: So his expression did change. He was thinking about something,
Speaker 2: he was feeling something. What was he feeling? Concern? He
Speaker 2: was feeling all kinds of possib feelings. He was feeling concern,
Speaker 2: he was thinking about his own situation. He happened to
Speaker 2: know this bad guy that's involved in the situation. In
Speaker 2: other words, this little, just this little sentence, this little
Speaker 2: innocent looking sentence that looks like it's a statement of
Speaker 2: fact about what's happening in the novel turns out to
Speaker 2: be Elizabeth's point of view. Why is that good for us?
Speaker 2: Because well, look, the whole novel is about pride and prejudice.
Speaker 2: It's not just about the pride and prejudice of the characters,
Speaker 2: it's about ours. Why did we we so quick to
Speaker 2: interpret the sentence that way? Because we're prejudiced because we
Speaker 2: have an existing belief about who Darcy is and what
Speaker 2: kind of character he has, and he can't possibly be different,
Speaker 2: he can't possibly be changed. Guess what we're wrong?
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It strikes me this is part of the passage.
Speaker 1: Into maturity that we all go through as humans, is
Speaker 1: learning that our first interpretation of something in life is
Speaker 1: not necessarily what we thought it was.
Speaker 2: But we have these.
Speaker 1: Internal models, and it's so hard to get over when
Speaker 1: we think that someone's just given us a mean look
Speaker 1: or something. I see my daughter who's in the fourth
Speaker 1: grade now constantly come home and say, oh, so and
Speaker 1: so looked or did this thing, And I think, gosh,
Speaker 1: there are probably many interpretations for what happened there, right,
Speaker 1: But all we ever live inside of is our internal model.
Speaker 1: And one thing the brain is good at doing is
Speaker 1: coming to conclusions. Instead of saying, well, there's a whole
Speaker 1: table of hypotheses here that I could hold on to,
Speaker 1: it collapses down to one theory about what just happened.
Speaker 2: I totally agree with you, and I think that's one
Speaker 2: of the enormous benefits of novel reading generally. I mean, obviously, again,
Speaker 2: you could read novels just you know, sort of light,
Speaker 2: fluffy stuff. You can read it for pleasure. Is nothing
Speaker 2: wrong with that, But the kind that really challenge us,
Speaker 2: like like J. Nausten's novels, like Tony Marshall's novels, like
Speaker 2: Flaubert's novels, Proof three thousand page Meema, they do us
Speaker 2: this enormous favorite. Milan Kundera talks about it. As you know,
Speaker 2: reality is always more complicated than you think, and novels,
Speaker 2: I think, get us into a better state of mind.
Speaker 2: About that by what I think of as handing our
Speaker 2: rear end to.
Speaker 1: Us, so as in making you think, okay, I've got this,
Speaker 1: I understand exactly what's going on, and then realizing, wow,
Speaker 1: I really misinterpreted exactly. It's practice at real life in
Speaker 1: that way, practice at real life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it you know, if you do enough of it,
Speaker 2: if you get into a kind of habit of novel reading,
Speaker 2: you're more likely to be just a little slower and
Speaker 2: jumping to these conclusions. And I think this habit of
Speaker 2: reading these interesting novels that challenge us and pull a
Speaker 2: rug out from under us should make us a little
Speaker 2: bit more circumspect.
Speaker 1: Exactly because the novel is like a sandbox that you
Speaker 1: get to play in, and you get to follow these
Speaker 1: trajectories and say, oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, things can turn out.
Speaker 1: I expect it, and yes, it strengthens our muscles for
Speaker 1: realizing that can happen in real life.
Speaker 2: You know, I just posted on my substack this issue.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this study before about how reading even
Speaker 1: short bits of literature can expand your empathy and your
Speaker 1: ability to see other people. This is a related issue
Speaker 1: because it's allowing you to see not only what someone
Speaker 1: else might be thinking, but what the whole situation could
Speaker 1: be and how you misinterpreted it.
Speaker 2: By the way, there's a good.
Speaker 1: Example in the movie Oppenheimert where Robert Downey Junior's character
Speaker 1: Lewis Strauss he's going to say something to Oppenheimer and
Speaker 1: Albert Einstein passes him and looks very angry, and so
Speaker 1: Strauss takes that personally and believes that Oppenheimer has just
Speaker 1: said something to Einstein against him, and the whole movie
Speaker 1: he hates Oppenheimer in part because of this, And at
Speaker 1: the very end of the movie, I hope this is
Speaker 1: a this is a minor spoiler, but at the very
Speaker 1: end of the movie we find out that this wasn't
Speaker 1: at all why Einstein had this concerned look on his face.
Speaker 1: It's because Oppenheimer had just told him about the nuclear
Speaker 1: bomb test and Einstein pictured the whole world going up
Speaker 1: in flames and was so struck and depressed. Why this
Speaker 1: vision he had of what was what the future was
Speaker 1: that he walked by, And when Strauss said hello, Einstein
Speaker 1: didn't even respond to him. And so we as the
Speaker 1: audience find out that this misinterpretation has been with Strauss
Speaker 1: for his whole career because of this, this one moment.
Speaker 2: That's a great example, and you know, it reminds us
Speaker 2: that these works of fiction makes self correction pleasurable. Right.
Speaker 2: And of course, you know, we make mistakes all the
Speaker 2: time in real life too, and sometimes we get our
Speaker 2: rear ends handed twists in real life too, but that's
Speaker 2: not pleasurable. But in fiction it's you know, oh wow,
Speaker 2: oh that's so interesting. And I think that kind of
Speaker 2: makes you know, it makes it go down easier, right,
Speaker 2: It makes us associate recognizing the limits of our capacities
Speaker 2: to know things with pleasure or at least not discomfort.
Speaker 2: And I think that's that's going to be good for
Speaker 2: us in the long run. In other way, it's the
Speaker 2: other sign to what we're talking about at the beginning
Speaker 2: about how rights can exploit biases. This is a way
Speaker 2: in which runs us can gently push back against biases. Right,
Speaker 2: these ways that we have of just distorting reality, of
Speaker 2: getting things wrong, of thinking we know everything when we don't.
Speaker 2: You can't completely undo that rain is what it is,
Speaker 2: but you can gently nudge back against it and make
Speaker 2: us a little bit better equipped to deal with the
Speaker 2: world and each other. So let me ask you this.
Speaker 1: You know, everybody's fictions of the future are always incorrect
Speaker 1: in terms of how will kids be consuming entertainment in
Speaker 1: the future. But one thing that does seem a little
Speaker 1: bit of a problem is that there's a lot more
Speaker 1: video game playing and a lot less novel reading.
Speaker 2: And the question is if we take that to its extreme.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that'll actually happen, but if kids
Speaker 1: didn't read any literature and instead they just played role
Speaker 1: playing action games, what is lost there?
Speaker 2: So I don't want to not all video games. I
Speaker 2: think there are actually some really interesting ones. There are
Speaker 2: some very interesting games where you have choices to make
Speaker 2: and at the end the game tells you this is
Speaker 2: what you chose. How do you feel about that? So
Speaker 2: there are actually some very interesting cases. But I do
Speaker 2: think nonetheless, even with the best video games out there, Look,
Speaker 2: each of our modes or cultural modes, has its own affordances,
Speaker 2: has its own specific things to offer. So video games
Speaker 2: have a particular thing to offer, but novels have this
Speaker 2: particular thing to offer, and this particular trick that Jane
Speaker 2: Austen pulls and that Flaubert Polls and other writers pull,
Speaker 2: you kind of can't do that as well in other things.
Speaker 1: Including by the way, TikTok videos or Instagram or tweet them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that concerns me just a little bit because investing
Speaker 1: maybe not a three thousand page novel, but investing in
Speaker 1: a novel and you think you have an interpretation, then
Speaker 1: you find out that was wrong.
Speaker 2: I just don't know if you can get that through
Speaker 2: other media. I think it's right, I think especially short films. Right,
Speaker 2: there are certain effects that can only be produced at
Speaker 2: a certain length. Certain emotions require time to produce. Not
Speaker 2: all emotions, but some emotions, you know, gosh, you have
Speaker 2: to you need to spend the time of the characters
Speaker 2: to get so invested that you will be profoundly affected
Speaker 2: by their death in a story, for example. Right, So
Speaker 2: there's a variety of things that kind of only really
Speaker 2: work or work out their strongest if you're reading a
Speaker 2: novel a couple hundred pages, maybe three thousand, let's tone
Speaker 2: it down a few undred pages. But similarly, you know,
Speaker 2: films have particular things to offer, and TV shows are
Speaker 2: particular things to.
Speaker 1: Offer exactly right, And you can watch a multi season
Speaker 1: television show and get that same sort of effect out
Speaker 1: of it. Yes, although I do want I just read
Speaker 1: a statistic that YouTube, the revenue that YouTube makes swamps
Speaker 1: Netflix and Disney and everyone else. And you know, they
Speaker 1: tend to be standalone things. You know, they're getting longer, interesting,
Speaker 1: like half an hour in length. But I you know, look,
Speaker 1: I'm not a cultural pessimist. I think that generally speaking,
Speaker 1: you know, each generation is good at some things and
Speaker 1: bad as of other things. And you know it's foolish
Speaker 1: to say, ah, the kids these days, things going to hell, right,
Speaker 1: So there are some great things happening now. But I
Speaker 1: also want to say, on the other side of that,
Speaker 1: I think we need to try to hang on to
Speaker 1: the practice of engaging with long form works of fiction,
Speaker 1: long form works in nonfiction as well. But in the
Speaker 1: context of our conversation, I don't want the world to
Speaker 1: devolve into just tiktoks or you know, a two minute
Speaker 1: YouTube video one after the other after the other. There
Speaker 1: are things that we're losing if we lose that.
Speaker 2: I agreed.
Speaker 1: Are there any other cognitive biases that writers exploit?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so one obvious one is the peak end, which
Speaker 2: Conoman talks about. So that's the phenomenon where if you're
Speaker 2: thinking about an experience that lasted for a certain length
Speaker 2: of time. Let's say you went to Paris for a
Speaker 2: week and somebody asks you, how was Paris. You're very likely,
Speaker 2: you know, if you want to give like a one
Speaker 2: would answer it was great. It was Paris. Of course
Speaker 2: it was great. But you know, you're going to be
Speaker 2: more influenced by the experience at its peak and the
Speaker 2: experience at its sense. So whatever the last thing was
Speaker 2: you did in Paris, and then whatever was either the
Speaker 2: greatest thing or the most horrible thing that happened in Paris.
Speaker 2: That affects our reading of literature too. It makes endings
Speaker 2: unusually important. Right, A great ending can almost save a
Speaker 2: mediocre work of art, and a terrible edd it can
Speaker 2: ruin what was otherwise a great work of art. So
Speaker 2: that's one another one which Viera Tobin has talked about,
Speaker 2: just this brilliant theory about this thing called the curse
Speaker 2: of knowledge and the curse of knowledg Knowledge is basically
Speaker 2: this phenomenon where once you know something, it becomes more
Speaker 2: difficult for you to imagine not knowing it. And it
Speaker 2: even applies to yourself of five minutes ago. So when
Speaker 2: when you're watching a quiz show and they give the answer,
Speaker 2: you think, ah, I should have known that, because now
Speaker 2: you know it, and so vera. Tobin says, this is
Speaker 2: one of the ways in which twists work in literature
Speaker 2: and in movies, that you want the reader or viewer
Speaker 2: to have this experience of of course it was Jimmy.
Speaker 2: Of course it was Jimmy. I should have known all along.
Speaker 2: But you don't want people to figure out it was
Speaker 2: Jimmy after five minutes. And that's a difficult thing to
Speaker 2: pull off as a writer or a screenwriter. So Tobin says, well, look,
Speaker 2: you exploit the curse of knowledge. You drop a few
Speaker 2: breadcrumbs around where you know it could be Jimmy, and
Speaker 2: by the time time you get to the end you
Speaker 2: reveal it's Jimmy. Because of the curse of knowledge, the
Speaker 2: viewer is going to say, oh, that's such a satisfying
Speaker 2: of of course it was Jimmy. So these are a
Speaker 2: couple more of these little quirks of our cognitive apparatus
Speaker 2: that writers can exploit to delight and challenge and and
Speaker 2: and push us not just out of our comfort zone,
Speaker 2: terrific and.
Speaker 1: So for other biases that writers can exploit, what about priming.
Speaker 2: What is priming great? So priming is a phenomenon where
Speaker 2: basically exposure to a given stimulus makes subsequent related stimuli
Speaker 2: more salient. So that's a lot of jargon. The basic
Speaker 2: thought is that if you've just seen a wolf and
Speaker 2: you're walking around in the forest, then some sudden rustling
Speaker 2: might make you think that's another wolf. Right, You're going
Speaker 2: to be more sensitive either to real or even imagined
Speaker 2: phenomena that are that are similar to what you've just experienced.
Speaker 2: So this shows up in all kinds of ways in
Speaker 2: literary texts. You can get people to anticipate things, whether
Speaker 2: they're going to be there or not. Priming works in
Speaker 2: some surprising ways.
Speaker 3: So for example, if you you know, if you if
Speaker 3: you flash up on a screen for fraction of a
Speaker 3: second the word eight, people will be quicker.
Speaker 2: As in E E I G H D I G
Speaker 2: H T got it. People with quicker to notice the
Speaker 2: number eight. That's straightforward. But they'll also be quicker to
Speaker 2: notice things that rhyme with that. And here's a really
Speaker 2: wild one. If you flash up the word towed t
Speaker 2: O W E D as in they towed my car yesterday,
Speaker 2: people are going to be quicker at recognizing the word frog.
Speaker 2: Why because obviously t O w D sounds a bit
Speaker 2: like t O A D the wart amphibian. So that's fascinating.
Speaker 2: Then what's going on in there? Somehow the brain is
Speaker 2: registering this, translate it into sounds and then generating associations
Speaker 2: based on those sounds, and.
Speaker 1: All that's happening under the hood. And and what this
Speaker 1: tells us, by the way, is that all this activity
Speaker 1: is constantly churning under the hood, even when we have
Speaker 1: no idea.
Speaker 2: Word flashes and I mean just.
Speaker 1: Exactly all the pathways that are tickled as a result
Speaker 1: of that exactly.
Speaker 2: So then this is a delicious thing for poets to exploit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Sonnet seven is a sonnet that is
Speaker 2: basically a sonnet about how how much it sucks to
Speaker 2: geld and it's it compares, you know, the search dijectorial
Speaker 2: life to the sun rising being high in the sky
Speaker 2: and then setting and and and the speaker basically says,
Speaker 2: you know, sounds pretty glorious when it rises, and then
Speaker 2: it's really powerful. Everyone's in all of the sun when
Speaker 2: it's at its height. But then when it goes down
Speaker 2: and doesn't give a monkey's about it anymore. And this
Speaker 2: is my situation, David, just kid. But here's the cool thing.
Speaker 2: The last coumpl it is so thou thyself outgoing in
Speaker 2: thy noon, unlooked on, diest unless thou hast a son.
Speaker 2: So what the speaker saying is, you're going to be
Speaker 2: in the situation of that son as it sets, where
Speaker 2: no one cares about you. You're going to be going
Speaker 2: to die unlooked on. People aren't going to pay any
Speaker 2: attention to you unless you have a child, Unless you
Speaker 2: have a son. This comes out of nowhere in the poem, right,
Speaker 2: there's nothing at all about love or marriage or procreation. Nothing.
Speaker 2: Suddenly the speaker's like, so anyway, you should have children,
Speaker 2: but specifically a son, specifically a son. And I hope
Speaker 2: you see where I'm going with this. On the one end,
Speaker 2: it comes out of nowhere, But on the other end
Speaker 2: doesn't feel like it comes out of nowhere. Why because
Speaker 2: we've been hearing the entire time about the sun s
Speaker 2: U N And that works on us exactly the same
Speaker 2: way that tweed works on us. And it makes the
Speaker 2: word sun feel completely natural. Yeah, we're primed to sort
Speaker 2: of half expect the word s O n son.
Speaker 1: So this comes back to the question I asked before,
Speaker 1: which is how in the world when Shakespeare or the
Speaker 1: different authors who we summarized Shakespeare, when they sat around
Speaker 1: and talked about this sort of thing, how did they
Speaker 1: How did they? Was it just an intuition that word
Speaker 1: feels right there?
Speaker 2: Possibly? I think we don't know enough abounce it. Uh,
Speaker 2: you know, we have some we have some writ things
Speaker 2: from for example, seventeenth century France. They were there's a
Speaker 2: big period of thinking hard about dramatic technique in particular,
Speaker 2: so there's lots of raging debates about how you do
Speaker 2: things and why there are stuff we have from tenth
Speaker 2: century Kashmir. So one of my fantastic former students now
Speaker 2: teaching at Claremont works on two guys named Ibnvagupta Ananda Vardner,
Speaker 2: and they're thinking about how do you produce poetry that
Speaker 2: elicits certain experiences, particularly emotional experiences in viewers, listeners, readers.
Speaker 2: So at certain times, in certain places you get actual
Speaker 2: explicit reflection on it, sometimes really insightful. But I think
Speaker 2: it's really the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in at least
Speaker 2: in the European tradition that people really start digging in
Speaker 2: to a bunch of these things, and so we can
Speaker 2: you know, we could be absolutely sure that Flaubert was
Speaker 2: thinking about the way his sentences sounded and their shape,
Speaker 2: and Prus was thinking about verb tenses. And that's something
Speaker 2: that is clearly happening. You know, as these as these
Speaker 2: crafts sort of become more professionalized and people are thinking
Speaker 2: about what they're doing. The central point for us is, yes,
Speaker 2: these many of these folks were just intuitive, aren'tists. They
Speaker 2: had a feeling this is how it's going to work,
Speaker 2: sometimes just by trying it on themselves.
Speaker 1: So this makes me think of something which is as
Speaker 1: a field, neuroscience constantly thinks, hey, we're just covering on things.
Speaker 1: Often there are plenty of examples scattered through the millennia
Speaker 1: where we see people have.
Speaker 2: Thought about these topics before. So here's the question I
Speaker 2: have for you.
Speaker 1: Let me take one step back to introduce this question,
Speaker 1: which is, if you look at what's happened, for example,
Speaker 1: in the game of chess or the game of go,
Speaker 1: what's happened is that Ai has come along beat the
Speaker 1: world champion, but all the human players have gotten better
Speaker 1: as a result, all the chess players in the world
Speaker 1: are better players now because they're training with AI. They're
Speaker 1: taking new hints and strategies from AI in both chess
Speaker 1: and go. And I've been very interested in what writers
Speaker 1: will do, and I'm very curious about things that maybe
Speaker 1: just haven't been intuited over the last couple of millennia.
Speaker 2: But we will realize, Hey, there's this whole new thing
Speaker 2: we can do here. Have you thought about this topic.
Speaker 2: We'll bound to be wrong whenever we say, I guess
Speaker 2: there's a couple of interesting analogs. Right, You've mentioned one
Speaker 2: the world of go and chess. Another is photography. So
Speaker 2: photography comes in in the nineteenth century, and some answersts
Speaker 2: are a little worried by that because you know, for
Speaker 2: some folks they saw themselves as being in the business
Speaker 2: of representing the world of sort of producing a faithful depiction.
Speaker 2: You mean painters, Yes, painters. Not everyone saw themselves in that,
Speaker 2: but just as some did. And so it's kind of
Speaker 2: an interesting challenge. Now, notice that you can go two ways.
Speaker 2: Some folks became photography artists. Right, We're going to take
Speaker 2: this new medium and exploit it for what it can
Speaker 2: do in the world was, you know, not just thinking
Speaker 2: of it as a kind of information gathering information gathering machine,
Speaker 2: but hey, you know, we can scratch the photo. We
Speaker 2: can you know, we can overexpose it. We're not under
Speaker 2: exposed it. We can solarize it. All kinds of cool things, right,
Speaker 2: or we can we can make photographs that are kind
Speaker 2: of surreal by juxtaposing things, all kinds of fantastic stuff
Speaker 2: in the domain of photography. But another very different trajectory
Speaker 2: consists of artists who are saying I'm going to do
Speaker 2: a thing that photography can't do, right, and that happens
Speaker 2: not only in photography, but interestingly also in literature. Of
Speaker 2: people even in literature are saying, well, this whole, this
Speaker 2: whole business photography is making me think literature shouldn't be
Speaker 2: photography either. Metaphorically speaking, literature shouldn't just be a kind
Speaker 2: of well, you know what, there are five houses on
Speaker 2: that street and one of them is read right, Okay,
Speaker 2: you're fine, you know, you take your camera out and
Speaker 2: you can you can transmit that information. I think we
Speaker 2: could potentially anticipate one or both of those things happening
Speaker 2: with the world of AI, so you could potentially imagine
Speaker 2: people taking this AI thing and making interesting as ounce
Speaker 2: of it. And I've seen some cases of that, but
Speaker 2: you could also, hopefully, I would like to think, imagine novelists,
Speaker 2: filmmakers and TV show ritss and so on saying themselves, Okay,
Speaker 2: this is an opportunity to think about what's special and
Speaker 2: distinctive about the medium that we have. What is it
Speaker 2: that we do that this technology can't do, and to
Speaker 2: try to really lean into that and push that to
Speaker 2: its limit.
Speaker 1: I love that and just a flesh set out, you know,
Speaker 1: with painting that led to the Impressionists and the surrealists
Speaker 1: and the Cubists and so on, because they said, look,
Speaker 1: photo can't do this. That's we're going to move into
Speaker 1: that realm there. And so it's very interesting to me.
Speaker 1: I can tell when I'm reading substack articles, I can
Speaker 1: tell who's just popped out of chat GYPTV who's really
Speaker 1: written it, because at least right now, there still exists
Speaker 1: a pretty big difference and you can tell human writing
Speaker 1: and it's so lovely. I feel like it's more appreciated
Speaker 1: than ever now.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's true, Thank goodness, right, and you know it's Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's an opportunity obviously a bunch of things are happening,
Speaker 2: some are good, some not so good. But whatever, whatever
Speaker 2: is happening, it's an opportunity for rest All to think about, Okay,
Speaker 2: why is it we value what we value? Why do
Speaker 2: we value I totally value it when an actual person
Speaker 2: wrote it right. Somebody said, watched I bother reading if
Speaker 2: you couldn't even be bothered to write it? And I
Speaker 2: think there's something about our relationship to Jane Austen, to
Speaker 2: Tony Morrison, to Marssell proof to these writers that we
Speaker 2: love spending time around too. Great filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman.
Speaker 2: There's something of a connection that we establish with them,
Speaker 2: almost a communion that we establish with them across their artwork,
Speaker 2: which is just not going to be the case with
Speaker 2: AI generated material. Now. You know, in some cases, like
Speaker 2: I'm a big fan of pop music, and I often
Speaker 2: care who wrote a song, but I don't always care
Speaker 2: who wrote a song right. So there are some cases
Speaker 2: where that's not necessarily the most important thing that's going
Speaker 2: on in the transaction, But there are other cases where
Speaker 2: it clearly is absolutely essential.
Speaker 1: Also, I would assert that as possible that you maybe
Speaker 1: care that the song was written by somebody.
Speaker 2: And part of this plugs is great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, part of the plugs into what I'm calling the
Speaker 1: effort phenomenon, which is just that we really care about
Speaker 1: the effort that's gone into something. And so when we
Speaker 1: look at Proust writing three thousand page novel and we
Speaker 1: imagine the years or possibly decades.
Speaker 2: That it took him to do that.
Speaker 1: You know, I could generate a three thousand page thing
Speaker 1: on chat GPT and you say, what a waste.
Speaker 2: I can't believe you'd actually want someone to read that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So it's the it's our understanding of what he
Speaker 1: did to get there that makes the difference. And by
Speaker 1: the way, this is why I, for example, you know,
Speaker 1: I give public lectures and I'm not at all worried
Speaker 1: about that going away because people really care.
Speaker 2: I think, possibly now more than.
Speaker 1: Ever, about seeing a human, you know, and having that
Speaker 1: human fly across the country and stand on that stage
Speaker 1: where I can see them.
Speaker 2: That makes a big difference. That's a great point. And
Speaker 2: then of course the Q and A where you yeah,
Speaker 2: you're not chat gptaying it. Yeah, it's real you, yeah,
Speaker 2: real them. I love this point, and it can be
Speaker 2: much more imperfect one of the abogies give this. I
Speaker 2: gave this analogy on on an episode a while ago.
Speaker 2: But there's this interesting thing with synthetic diamonds. Now, you
Speaker 2: can in a laboratory generate a synthetic diamond that is perfect,
Speaker 2: that has no flaws in it, but still people care
Speaker 2: about the real thing with the flaws and won't pay
Speaker 2: much more money for it because, in a sense, Mother
Speaker 2: Nature put a billion years of effort into making that thing,
Speaker 2: as opposed to five days in the lab. That's a
Speaker 2: lovely analogy. I love that. I always think of Michelangelo's
Speaker 2: Sistine Champel ceiling. I mean, it's intrinsically beautiful, but part
Speaker 2: of what we're experiencing is how did he do that?
Speaker 2: The virtue walcity is part of the experience. Yeah, how
Speaker 2: did you do that? How did Michael Angelier pay the
Speaker 2: Sisting Champel ceiling? How did Tony Morrison manage to pull
Speaker 2: that incredible trick on us? And it's not just a
Speaker 2: cheap trick. Yeah, it's a trick that moves us. It's
Speaker 2: a trick that challenges us. It's a trick that makes
Speaker 2: us relate to the world in a different way. It's
Speaker 2: extraordinaring and you just have to take your hat off
Speaker 2: to Tony Morrison, and that is an experience of a
Speaker 2: human being that cannot be replicated through technology.
Speaker 1: That was my interview with my colleague at stand for,
Speaker 1: Joshua Landy, as we talked about just a few of
Speaker 1: the issues that surface in our course literature and the brain.
Speaker 1: And so this brings me back to the beginning of
Speaker 1: the podcast, to my kitchen where my daughter sits frozen,
Speaker 1: her eyes darting around while her head is locked on
Speaker 1: a page, and she is living in a world with
Speaker 1: a monkey and a cat in outer space. Her body
Speaker 1: is in the here and now, but her mind is elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And that I think is the extraordinary magic of literature.
Speaker 1: It takes the most advanced piece of biological hardware in
Speaker 1: the known universe, the brain, and invites it to simulate
Speaker 1: entire worlds, to run experiments in alternate lives, to dance
Speaker 1: with ambiguity, and to revise its assumptions again and again.
Speaker 1: What literature offers us isn't just entertainment. It's a rehearsal
Speaker 1: space for empathy, for introspection, for humility. It teaches us
Speaker 1: that our first instincts can be wrong, that people are
Speaker 1: more complicated than they seem, that the world sometimes resists
Speaker 1: tidy packaging, and the active reading becomes a kind of
Speaker 1: cognitive calisthenics, one that exercises the mental muscles we need
Speaker 1: in a complex, unpredictable society. We need curiosity and perspective taking,
Speaker 1: and nuance and self doubt. So writers, most of whom
Speaker 1: presumably had no training in neuroscience, have for millennia intuited
Speaker 1: how to guide our attention, how to play on our biases,
Speaker 1: how to surprise and disarm us, how to steer us
Speaker 1: down garden paths, and how to leave us saying, oh,
Speaker 1: my god, of course that's what happened.
Speaker 2: These aren't just parlor tricks.
Speaker 1: These are acts of generosity, because what they offer us
Speaker 1: is the chance to rewire ourselves to become slightly different,
Speaker 1: slightly better versions of who we were before we picked
Speaker 1: up the book. And that's why we might worry just
Speaker 1: a little about the declining time that many people, especially
Speaker 1: young people, are spending in the deep space of novels.
Speaker 1: This is not because video games or tiktoks or youtubes
Speaker 1: are inherently bad, but because they rarely offer the same
Speaker 1: rigor of cognitive training. These short form things aren't generally
Speaker 1: built to cultivate ambiguity or to stretch empathy across chapters
Speaker 1: or lifetimes. Some might do it once in a while,
Speaker 1: but novels specialize in it. So let's make sure we
Speaker 1: don't lose the habit. Let's remember the strange human superpower
Speaker 1: that we've developed to sit still, to decode squiggles on
Speaker 1: a page, and to be emotionally transformed by people who
Speaker 1: never existed. Let's honor the decades long effort that a
Speaker 1: great author might spend to gift us with one transcendent moment.
Speaker 1: And let's recognize that reading literature isn't passive consumption.
Speaker 2: It's active simulation. It's mental travel in time and space.
Speaker 1: It's the brain doing what it does best, building models
Speaker 1: of the world, running them forward, learning, updating, and every
Speaker 1: once in a while feeling awe. So the next time
Speaker 1: use it down with a good novel, know this, you're
Speaker 1: not wasting time. You're going to the cognitive gym to
Speaker 1: become a stronger human. Go to Eagleman dot com slash
Speaker 1: podcast for more and and to find further reading. Check
Speaker 1: out my newsletter on substack and be a part of
Speaker 1: the online chats there and you can watch videos of
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos on YouTube, or you can leave comments.
Speaker 2: Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.