The New York Times has an interesting op-ed piece by Annie Murphy Paul about the neurological experience of reading fiction:
"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings." More.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Your Brain on Fiction
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Eric Kandel on Erasing Memories
Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Eric Kandel, who visited the Writers Institute in 2006, is featured in a New York Times interview today.
He talks, among other things, about his childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna and about the prospect for using new developments in neuroscience to erase unpleasant memories:
"I have no difficulty about enhancing memory. Removing memory is more complicated. If it’s to reduce the impact of a particular trauma, I have no difficulty with that, but there are other ways to deal with it — cognitive behavior therapy, exposure therapy, drugs. To go into your head and pluck out a memory of an unfortunate love experience, that’s a bad idea. You know, in the end, we are who we are. We’re all part of what we’ve experienced. Would I have liked to have had the Viennese experience removed from me? No! And it was horrible. But it shapes you."
More.