June 2, 2025 • 49 mins
How do brains slip so easily from the real world into made up worlds? What do authors of great literature have in common with stage magicians and comedians? What does any of this have to do with cognitive shortcuts, prediction machines, Marcel Proust, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, or why jokes are always structured in threes? Join Eagleman this week for a conversation with his Stanford colleague Joshua Landy as they discuss brains on story.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Why do brains love stories? How do brains move so
easily from assessing reality out there to slipping into totally
made up worlds that you know are made up? What
do authors of great literature have in common with stage
magicians and comedians? And what does any of this have
(00:26):
to do with cognitive shortcuts? Or how the brain is
a prediction machine? Or Marcel Proust or Tony Morrison or
Jane Austen, or why jokes always come in threes. Welcome
to enter cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist
(00:46):
and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we
sail deeply into our three pound universe to uncover some
of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode
(01:13):
is about why humans read books. I was watching my
young daughter the other day. She loves to jump around
and dance and be on the move, but she was
sitting stock still in the kitchen, staring at symbols of
strange shapes written on a page, something like hieroglyphics or
(01:33):
weird squiggles. Now, it just so happens that English is
the language that I speak and read, so the squiggles
of that alphabet don't look strange to me.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
My brain has overtrained on them so that.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
They immediately carry meaning, and my daughter, in the last
several years, has also overtrained on them. But obviously, if
I were from another place on the planet, I would
see these only as weird squiggles. Anyway, she was staring
at these and was obviously transported internally to another world.
(02:08):
Even though she was sitting in our kitchen, her mind
was elsewhere. Now this is strange because any neuroscience textbook
that you read, including my own, will assert that brains
are all about gathering information from their environment. Your eyes
are scanning for threats and opportunities in front of you.
(02:32):
Your ears are listening, your nose is smelling, your skin
is registering information. All of it is about monitoring what
is happening around you. And yet it is extraordinarily easy
for us to stare at these cryptic symbols and be
transported into completely new worlds. In this case, my daughter
(02:55):
was in the life of somebody else. Specifically, she was
on a long trip through space with a cat and
a monkey.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
That's what her brain thought. At least for the most part.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It wasn't so aware of the details of the kitchen
and the sounds around her. Instead, most of the processing
hardware was busy living in this other world, one which
had its own trials and tribulations, and, by the way,
one which doesn't actually exist, but which nonetheless has no
(03:28):
problem making her laugh and cry and occupy all of
her attention. So this kind of thing got me wondering
a long time ago about why it is so easy
for us to slip into other worlds, and more importantly,
into other characters' lives and to experience their situation and
(03:51):
their emotions. So to this point, one of the classes
I teach at Stanford is called Literature and the Brain.
I co teach this with a wonderful colleague of mine,
doctor Joshua Landy, who works in the Comparative Literature department.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
For years, josh.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
And I have both been obsessed from different angles about
the big picture of how and why stories pervade all
human cultures, and not only are they there, but they're
the main thing that characterizes the culture. We are more
than information gatherers. We are a very particular type of
information gatherer, and universally, it seems that the optimal way
(04:34):
to swallow the jagged pill of information is to wrap
it in story. So here's my interview with my colleague
Joshua Landy. So, josh you and I have known each
other for a long time and for many years now
we've been teaching a class at Stanford called Literature and
(04:55):
the Brain, and that's proven to be a very popular class.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Happily people are in thanks to you. Yeah, thanks to you.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
And so I'm you know, I'm a neuroscientist. You're in
the comparative literature department. But I love literature. You love
cognitive science, and so that's what's put us together.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
It's been very fruitful.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
So today let's talk about You have a statement that
you make, which is that cognitive biases, which are all
the funny things that our brain does when they're taking
shortcuts and so on, that these are a writer's best friend.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
So let's start there. What do you mean by that? Yeah,
so you've written beautifully about these quirks of the human brain,
right that it's constantly making shortcuts because we just don't
have the glucose, we don't have the energy, we don't
have the time to be thinking everything through down to
the last detail. So we have to make little cognitive
(05:48):
shortcuts rules of thumb to get us through our day.
And for the most part these were great, But I'm
gonna and again they get us into a little bit
of trouble, and sometimes it's fun trouble, right, That's the
basis of some jokes. Some of these jokes depend on
tempting the listener into making a certain kind of mistake.
(06:09):
So it's an example of such a joke, well, one
of Mike's. It's not particularly funny joke, but it's a
good example, which is the pot is in the kitchen cabinet,
don't smoke it all at once. This is an example
of a garden path joke, or as Americans say, garden
path joke. What you're doing is you're tempting the listener
(06:30):
to think that you're saying a particular thing. Well, the
pot is in the kitchen cabinet. If it's the kitchen cabinet,
it must be some kind of utensil. But not haha,
the joke's on you. Obviously that's not what it was
in the first place. So this is a case where
you're exploiting a certain tendency on the part of the brain,
which is to kind of you know, project out into
(06:52):
the future, to predict things, to fill things in when
they're not fully given to you, which we need in
our daily lives.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Exactly the brain. The brain, of course, there's a prediction machine.
And that's because the world is so complex, and really
the art of growing up and the job of brain
plasticity is to say, ah, okay, this is the likely
next token, as we would phrase it now in the
age of llms, but it's to say.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
This is the likely thing that's going to happen next. Yeah.
You have a good example of a joke, and in
that vein the doctor joke, Oh yeah, I heard that
from a comedian a long time ago.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
He said, I went to the doctor and the doctor said, okay,
take off your clothes and put him there in the
corner next to mine.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
There you go. And the reason it works as a
joke is.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Because we have an internal model of the world and
all that language, ever is, is throwing small bits of
data over the transom and we say, oh, I got it,
I've got this word, I've got the next word. Great,
I can put together this very rich model of what's
going on.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
So we never expected that.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
And this is the notion of the garden path, And
so how do writers exploit this cognitive bias exactly right?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
So that you know, these great riances will often tempt
you to make certain kinds of prediction, and then they'll,
you know, pull the rug out of mone of you.
And sometimes it's in jokes, because often that rule of
three where you sort of say the first thing, say
a second similar thing established as a pattern. Now we're
fully predicting that the third thing is going to be
(08:25):
the same, and then ha ha, no joke's on you.
Sometimes it's serious. So one of my favorite examples is
from Madame Bowin. I don't want to spoil too much
about the plot here, so I'll just say a particular
unfortunate thing happens, and then a very similar and fortunate
happened thing happens again. And so by the time you're
in a third similar situation, you're fully expecting this is
(08:47):
probably not going to go very well, right, So so
this can be for humorous effect, but can also be
for very serious effect. These great riances are setting us
up to make certain predictions about what's going to come next,
which they can then satisfy or undermine.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
That's exactly right. So it's used in literary fiction. It's
also used in genre fiction. Obviously, in any sort of
mystery book, what or thriller. What the author is doing
is saying, Okay, look at this, look at this, look
at this, and he or she is just making sure
that we make particular kinds of predictions. And then at
(09:26):
the end they say, ha ha, it's actually this other
thing that you totally miss because we led you down
the garden path.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Which brings me to another cognitiviance that writes this can exploit,
which is selective attention. So this is of course the
staple of stage magic, right that magicians I don't even
I mean I sort of know how they do it,
but I basically don't know how they do it because
it's extraordinary. But they're able to exploit the fact that
(09:52):
our our brains cannot attend to everything at once in
order to hide things almost in plain sight, like close
up magic. They're right in front of you, and yet
you have no idea how they did this thing they did. Interestingly,
literary writers can do the same thing, and this is
one of my favorite phenomena in literature, the experience of
(10:12):
oh my god, of course, and so how do you
pull that off? Right? How do you pull off the
experience for the reader or the viewer of Oh my God?
Of course? Well, essentially you have to put something in
your movie, in your TV show, in your novel that's
visible just enough so that the viewer remembers it later on.
(10:33):
What's an example? All right? So, one of not just
my favorite novels, but I know your favorite novels because
we teach it together in our class is Tony Morrison's
novel Song of Solomon. And I'm not going to say
too much about the plot here. It's just be a
very mild spoiler. There is a fantastic scene right at
the beginning of the novel where you see this guy
(10:56):
at the top of a tall building with these homemade
wings on his back, and he's announced to everybody he's
gonna fly. He's gonna take off from the tower and fly,
and you're kind of worried that he's not actually gonna fly.
It's gonna go very badly for him. Meanwhile, somebody's going
into labor down on the ground, and somebody else expills
(11:18):
this this basket full of homemade petals and all kinds
of stuff is going on it's a bright colors, the
blue wings, the white snow, the red petals, the woman
going into labor, the man at risk of dying, and
by the way, somebody's singing a song. Now, this song
is going to turn out to be very important much
(11:40):
later on in the novel. And indeed the song is
in the title of the novel. But I will bet
you dollars to donuts that the vast majority of readers
just do not notice the song, or they notice it
just enough that when it comes back towards the end
of the novel, they're like, oh my god, that song.
(12:00):
But it's hidden in plain sight because you're attending to
this potential death, and you're attending to the birth, and
you're attending to the spilling of the petals and the
colors and everything else. Brilliant. It's a kind of genius
move on the part of Tony Morris. Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
And just to flesh out of this idea of selective attention,
you know, let's let's take visual attention.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
It's like a little spotlight and you.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Can make it narrow or you can make it slightly wider,
but everything outside of your field of attention you just
completely miss and hence all these things. Everyone's seen these
on the internet. At this, you know, inattentional blindness, where
you're trying, you're paying attention to something and as a
result of that, you don't see something else, like the
guy in the gorilla suit who walks in and beats
(12:46):
his chest. So, and of course this is why it
works with magic, because the magician does something.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
You know, magicians do this thing.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Instead of moving their hands and straight lines, they typically
do it in a curve. And I don't know, this
is just something they picked up on a while ago
that you just can't help but watch if someone's hand
does something, you think, hey, that hand is up to something,
and your.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Attention goes to that.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Even if your eyeballs are watching the thing they're supposed
to be watching, your attention is on the hand moving.
And so then the magician can do whatever they want
outside of your field of attention. And so this is
indeed related to the garden path issue because the writer
gets to drop clues on things, but just so long
(13:29):
as making sure that your attention is elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Yeah, okay, good.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
So these are things that neuroscientists have been studying for
a long time and novelists have been exploiting presumably for
much longer that neuroscientists have been studying this.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
That is right, and that's an important point, right. The
thought is not that, you know, Shakespeare gotten a time
machine and traveled to the twentieth or twenty first century
and read a bunch of cogni science. No, but you know,
honests tend to work great art sent to work intuitively.
They have this intuitive sense of what's gonna land. How
(14:05):
obviously the same it's the stage magicians. Stage magic's been
around for a very long time. It got a kind
of you know, it entered its sort of modern phase
in the nineteenth century with people like Udin long name,
but that's Houdini named himself after this guy, and he
was he was the first one to really transform into
(14:26):
something kind of professional where he wasn't pretending to summon spirits.
He called his tricks experiments as though he were a scientist.
Wow magician. So anyway, this is a kind of digression
into something that I'm excited about, but it's not totally
on topic. But the main point is all of these
folks have this intuitive sense, based on experience of how
(14:49):
you get things to land. In a certain way, and
now we have all these wonderful scientists like you who
are explaining why they got it right.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
You know, it makes me wonder when magicians, let's say
a thousand years ago, performing to the king and maybe
summoning spirits, whatever they were doing.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
But it makes me wonder what vocabulary they used among
one another?
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Did they talk about the spotlight of attention in some way?
Did they intuit the mechanism as much as the what
to do about it?
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I mean, we don't have all the records of what
we would need for that, especially as magicians keep diffe.
It's interesting wonder about.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Authors though, Let's say a thousand years ago, an author
who dropped clues over here but wanted to make sure
the audience's tension was over there.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
I wonder how they described.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
That when they, let's say, taught small seminar classes to
other authors, how do they talk about it?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So we don't have those records, but it's very interesting
to read what people are saying, you know, in the
late nineteth century, early twentieth century, because that we have
a bunch of people's letters, and we have people's essays,
and you know, one of my Favorites is an essay
by my favorite novelist, Marcel Proust, author of the three
thousand page be Off in Search of Lost Time. Have
(16:04):
you read the whole thing? Oh? Yeah, many times? Wow?
How long does it take you to go through the
first time? It took me seven years. Yeah, it's you know,
it's an investment. But that's well, that's part of what
you and I think about in the classes. You know,
why do we make those investments? And it's not just
for entertainment, and it's not irrational, it's completely irrational where
(16:26):
there are huge benefits that we get from the time
that we spend in our loving engagement with novels and
TV shows and movies that are that are challenging, not
just the ones that wear cars blow up. But to
go back to your question, you know, Pruce writes this
essay on Flaubert, the nineteenth century novelist, and he says,
you know, you're My favorite line in Flaubert is he
traveled two words sentence. It's a two words sentence, and
(16:53):
what Prusce loves about it is the use of verb tense,
so that this novel that is talking about by Flaubert, sorry,
sentimental education suddenly shifts from this kind of gradual imperfect
tense where things are kind of moving slowly and you
have maybe one hundred pages for an afternoon to this
(17:17):
He traveled, where you're compressing ten years into two words. Oh,
so you have these really interesting instances of writing just
talking about their craft, and they will talk about things
like that. They will say, you know, think about the
verb tenses using think about the way in which you're
handling time. Think about the point of view in the
novel and how it can shift, and how you can
(17:37):
trick the reader. I mean, that's a big thing in Flaubert,
and also in Jane Austen, tricking the She doesn't we
don't have the as far as I know, the records
of her talking about this, but it's clear in Flaubert
these writers are deliberately tricking us. They are tricking us
into thinking that some sequence of words is said to
(17:58):
you by the author and a ratre and it's just true,
when in reality it's actually just somebody's point of view.
And this turns out to be really good for us,
And why do you think it's good for us? So
this is another way in which, you know, I think
writers can in a salutary way exploit the frailties of
(18:20):
our cognitive apparatus, right, so why is it good for us?
You know, we encounter some kind of claim in a
work of fiction. A good example in Jane Austen's Pride
and Prejudice. There's a scene where this I borrow from
my friend and colleague Nnie Anderson. There's this scene where
Elizabeth Bennett is looking talking to mister Darcy, and everyone
(18:44):
will remember this from the novel of the Fantastic TV adaptation,
and she's talking to about this, this horrible situation with
her sister, and everyone's afraid of it and afraid what's
going to happen? And Darcy says something, and then the
line is a deeper shape of auteur spread across his features. Oh,
he's even more arrogant and supercilious than he ever was before.
(19:07):
He's disgusted. What a horrible family. These guys are trailer trash.
You know what am I getting myself involved in? Turns
out much later than the novel, It wasn't out at all.
So his expression did change. He was thinking about something,
he was feeling something. What was he feeling? Concern? He
was feeling all kinds of possib feelings. He was feeling concern,
(19:29):
he was thinking about his own situation. He happened to
know this bad guy that's involved in the situation. In
other words, this little, just this little sentence, this little
innocent looking sentence that looks like it's a statement of
fact about what's happening in the novel turns out to
be Elizabeth's point of view. Why is that good for us?
(19:49):
Because well, look, the whole novel is about pride and prejudice.
It's not just about the pride and prejudice of the characters,
it's about ours. Why did we we so quick to
interpret the sentence that way? Because we're prejudiced because we
have an existing belief about who Darcy is and what
kind of character he has, and he can't possibly be different,
(20:11):
he can't possibly be changed. Guess what we're wrong?
Speaker 1 (20:32):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
It strikes me this is part of the passage.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Into maturity that we all go through as humans, is
learning that our first interpretation of something in life is
not necessarily what we thought it was.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
But we have these.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Internal models, and it's so hard to get over when
we think that someone's just given us a mean look
or something. I see my daughter who's in the fourth
grade now constantly come home and say, oh, so and
so looked or did this thing, And I think, gosh,
there are probably many interpretations for what happened there, right,
But all we ever live inside of is our internal model.
And one thing the brain is good at doing is
(21:08):
coming to conclusions. Instead of saying, well, there's a whole
table of hypotheses here that I could hold on to,
it collapses down to one theory about what just happened.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
I totally agree with you, and I think that's one
of the enormous benefits of novel reading generally. I mean, obviously, again,
you could read novels just you know, sort of light,
fluffy stuff. You can read it for pleasure. Is nothing
wrong with that, But the kind that really challenge us,
like like J. Nausten's novels, like Tony Marshall's novels, like
Flaubert's novels, Proof three thousand page Meema, they do us
(21:43):
this enormous favorite. Milan Kundera talks about it. As you know,
reality is always more complicated than you think, and novels,
I think, get us into a better state of mind.
About that by what I think of as handing our
rear end to.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Us, so as in making you think, okay, I've got this,
I understand exactly what's going on, and then realizing, wow,
I really misinterpreted exactly. It's practice at real life in
that way, practice at real life.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Yeah, and it you know, if you do enough of it,
if you get into a kind of habit of novel reading,
you're more likely to be just a little slower and
jumping to these conclusions. And I think this habit of
reading these interesting novels that challenge us and pull a
rug out from under us should make us a little
bit more circumspect.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Exactly because the novel is like a sandbox that you
get to play in, and you get to follow these
trajectories and say, oh.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah, things can turn out.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
I expect it, and yes, it strengthens our muscles for
realizing that can happen in real life.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
You know, I just posted on my substack this issue.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
We've talked about this study before about how reading even
short bits of literature can expand your empathy and your
ability to see other people. This is a related issue
because it's allowing you to see not only what someone
else might be thinking, but what the whole situation could
be and how you misinterpreted it.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
By the way, there's a good.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Example in the movie Oppenheimert where Robert Downey Junior's character
Lewis Strauss he's going to say something to Oppenheimer and
Albert Einstein passes him and looks very angry, and so
Strauss takes that personally and believes that Oppenheimer has just
(23:28):
said something to Einstein against him, and the whole movie
he hates Oppenheimer in part because of this, And at
the very end of the movie, I hope this is
a this is a minor spoiler, but at the very
end of the movie we find out that this wasn't
at all why Einstein had this concerned look on his face.
It's because Oppenheimer had just told him about the nuclear
(23:50):
bomb test and Einstein pictured the whole world going up
in flames and was so struck and depressed. Why this
vision he had of what was what the future was
that he walked by, And when Strauss said hello, Einstein
didn't even respond to him. And so we as the
audience find out that this misinterpretation has been with Strauss
(24:14):
for his whole career because of this, this one moment.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
That's a great example, and you know, it reminds us
that these works of fiction makes self correction pleasurable. Right.
And of course, you know, we make mistakes all the
time in real life too, and sometimes we get our
rear ends handed twists in real life too, but that's
not pleasurable. But in fiction it's you know, oh wow,
(24:38):
oh that's so interesting. And I think that kind of
makes you know, it makes it go down easier, right,
It makes us associate recognizing the limits of our capacities
to know things with pleasure or at least not discomfort.
And I think that's that's going to be good for
us in the long run. In other way, it's the
(24:59):
other sign to what we're talking about at the beginning
about how rights can exploit biases. This is a way
in which runs us can gently push back against biases. Right,
these ways that we have of just distorting reality, of
getting things wrong, of thinking we know everything when we don't.
You can't completely undo that rain is what it is,
(25:21):
but you can gently nudge back against it and make
us a little bit better equipped to deal with the
world and each other. So let me ask you this.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
You know, everybody's fictions of the future are always incorrect
in terms of how will kids be consuming entertainment in
the future. But one thing that does seem a little
bit of a problem is that there's a lot more
video game playing and a lot less novel reading.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
And the question is if we take that to its extreme.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
I don't know if that'll actually happen, but if kids
didn't read any literature and instead they just played role
playing action games, what is lost there?
Speaker 2 (25:57):
So I don't want to not all video games. I
think there are actually some really interesting ones. There are
some very interesting games where you have choices to make
and at the end the game tells you this is
what you chose. How do you feel about that? So
there are actually some very interesting cases. But I do
think nonetheless, even with the best video games out there, Look,
(26:18):
each of our modes or cultural modes, has its own affordances,
has its own specific things to offer. So video games
have a particular thing to offer, but novels have this
particular thing to offer, and this particular trick that Jane
Austen pulls and that Flaubert Polls and other writers pull,
you kind of can't do that as well in other things.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Including by the way, TikTok videos or Instagram or tweet them.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Yeah, that concerns me just a little bit because investing
maybe not a three thousand page novel, but investing in
a novel and you think you have an interpretation, then
you find out that was wrong.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
I just don't know if you can get that through
other media. I think it's right, I think especially short films. Right,
there are certain effects that can only be produced at
a certain length. Certain emotions require time to produce. Not
all emotions, but some emotions, you know, gosh, you have
to you need to spend the time of the characters
to get so invested that you will be profoundly affected
(27:18):
by their death in a story, for example. Right, So
there's a variety of things that kind of only really
work or work out their strongest if you're reading a
novel a couple hundred pages, maybe three thousand, let's tone
it down a few undred pages. But similarly, you know,
films have particular things to offer, and TV shows are
(27:38):
particular things to.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Offer exactly right, And you can watch a multi season
television show and get that same sort of effect out
of it. Yes, although I do want I just read
a statistic that YouTube, the revenue that YouTube makes swamps
Netflix and Disney and everyone else. And you know, they
tend to be standalone things. You know, they're getting longer, interesting,
(28:00):
like half an hour in length. But I you know, look,
I'm not a cultural pessimist. I think that generally speaking,
you know, each generation is good at some things and
bad as of other things. And you know it's foolish
to say, ah, the kids these days, things going to hell, right,
So there are some great things happening now. But I
(28:23):
also want to say, on the other side of that,
I think we need to try to hang on to
the practice of engaging with long form works of fiction,
long form works in nonfiction as well. But in the
context of our conversation, I don't want the world to
devolve into just tiktoks or you know, a two minute
(28:45):
YouTube video one after the other after the other. There
are things that we're losing if we lose that.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
I agreed.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Are there any other cognitive biases that writers exploit?
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yeah, so one obvious one is the peak end, which
Conoman talks about. So that's the phenomenon where if you're
thinking about an experience that lasted for a certain length
of time. Let's say you went to Paris for a
week and somebody asks you, how was Paris. You're very likely,
(29:16):
you know, if you want to give like a one
would answer it was great. It was Paris. Of course
it was great. But you know, you're going to be
more influenced by the experience at its peak and the
experience at its sense. So whatever the last thing was
you did in Paris, and then whatever was either the
greatest thing or the most horrible thing that happened in Paris.
That affects our reading of literature too. It makes endings
(29:40):
unusually important. Right, A great ending can almost save a
mediocre work of art, and a terrible edd it can
ruin what was otherwise a great work of art. So
that's one another one which Viera Tobin has talked about,
just this brilliant theory about this thing called the curse
of knowledge and the curse of knowledg Knowledge is basically
(30:01):
this phenomenon where once you know something, it becomes more
difficult for you to imagine not knowing it. And it
even applies to yourself of five minutes ago. So when
when you're watching a quiz show and they give the answer,
you think, ah, I should have known that, because now
you know it, and so vera. Tobin says, this is
(30:23):
one of the ways in which twists work in literature
and in movies, that you want the reader or viewer
to have this experience of of course it was Jimmy.
Of course it was Jimmy. I should have known all along.
But you don't want people to figure out it was
(30:44):
Jimmy after five minutes. And that's a difficult thing to
pull off as a writer or a screenwriter. So Tobin says, well, look,
you exploit the curse of knowledge. You drop a few
breadcrumbs around where you know it could be Jimmy, and
by the time time you get to the end you
reveal it's Jimmy. Because of the curse of knowledge, the
viewer is going to say, oh, that's such a satisfying
(31:06):
of of course it was Jimmy. So these are a
couple more of these little quirks of our cognitive apparatus
that writers can exploit to delight and challenge and and
and push us not just out of our comfort zone,
terrific and.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
So for other biases that writers can exploit, what about priming.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
What is priming great? So priming is a phenomenon where
basically exposure to a given stimulus makes subsequent related stimuli
more salient. So that's a lot of jargon. The basic
thought is that if you've just seen a wolf and
you're walking around in the forest, then some sudden rustling
(31:45):
might make you think that's another wolf. Right, You're going
to be more sensitive either to real or even imagined
phenomena that are that are similar to what you've just experienced.
So this shows up in all kinds of ways in
literary texts. You can get people to anticipate things, whether
they're going to be there or not. Priming works in
(32:09):
some surprising ways.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
So for example, if you you know, if you if
you flash up on a screen for fraction of a
second the word eight, people will be quicker.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
As in E E I G H D I G
H T got it. People with quicker to notice the
number eight. That's straightforward. But they'll also be quicker to
notice things that rhyme with that. And here's a really
wild one. If you flash up the word towed t
O W E D as in they towed my car yesterday,
(32:45):
people are going to be quicker at recognizing the word frog.
Why because obviously t O w D sounds a bit
like t O A D the wart amphibian. So that's fascinating.
Then what's going on in there? Somehow the brain is
registering this, translate it into sounds and then generating associations
based on those sounds, and.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
All that's happening under the hood. And and what this
tells us, by the way, is that all this activity
is constantly churning under the hood, even when we have
no idea.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Word flashes and I mean just.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Exactly all the pathways that are tickled as a result
of that exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
So then this is a delicious thing for poets to exploit. Yeah,
so Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Sonnet seven is a sonnet that is
basically a sonnet about how how much it sucks to
geld and it's it compares, you know, the search dijectorial
(33:43):
life to the sun rising being high in the sky
and then setting and and and the speaker basically says,
you know, sounds pretty glorious when it rises, and then
it's really powerful. Everyone's in all of the sun when
it's at its height. But then when it goes down
and doesn't give a monkey's about it anymore. And this
is my situation, David, just kid. But here's the cool thing.
(34:08):
The last coumpl it is so thou thyself outgoing in
thy noon, unlooked on, diest unless thou hast a son.
So what the speaker saying is, you're going to be
in the situation of that son as it sets, where
no one cares about you. You're going to be going
(34:30):
to die unlooked on. People aren't going to pay any
attention to you unless you have a child, Unless you
have a son. This comes out of nowhere in the poem, right,
there's nothing at all about love or marriage or procreation. Nothing.
Suddenly the speaker's like, so anyway, you should have children,
but specifically a son, specifically a son. And I hope
(34:53):
you see where I'm going with this. On the one end,
it comes out of nowhere, But on the other end
doesn't feel like it comes out of nowhere. Why because
we've been hearing the entire time about the sun s
U N And that works on us exactly the same
way that tweed works on us. And it makes the
word sun feel completely natural. Yeah, we're primed to sort
(35:15):
of half expect the word s O n son.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
So this comes back to the question I asked before,
which is how in the world when Shakespeare or the
different authors who we summarized Shakespeare, when they sat around
and talked about this sort of thing, how did they
How did they? Was it just an intuition that word
feels right there?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Possibly? I think we don't know enough abounce it. Uh,
you know, we have some we have some writ things
from for example, seventeenth century France. They were there's a
big period of thinking hard about dramatic technique in particular,
so there's lots of raging debates about how you do
things and why there are stuff we have from tenth
(36:11):
century Kashmir. So one of my fantastic former students now
teaching at Claremont works on two guys named Ibnvagupta Ananda Vardner,
and they're thinking about how do you produce poetry that
elicits certain experiences, particularly emotional experiences in viewers, listeners, readers.
So at certain times, in certain places you get actual
(36:34):
explicit reflection on it, sometimes really insightful. But I think
it's really the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in at least
in the European tradition that people really start digging in
to a bunch of these things, and so we can
you know, we could be absolutely sure that Flaubert was
thinking about the way his sentences sounded and their shape,
(36:56):
and Prus was thinking about verb tenses. And that's something
that is clearly happening. You know, as these as these
crafts sort of become more professionalized and people are thinking
about what they're doing. The central point for us is, yes,
these many of these folks were just intuitive, aren'tists. They
(37:17):
had a feeling this is how it's going to work,
sometimes just by trying it on themselves.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
So this makes me think of something which is as
a field, neuroscience constantly thinks, hey, we're just covering on things.
Often there are plenty of examples scattered through the millennia
where we see people have.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Thought about these topics before. So here's the question I
have for you.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Let me take one step back to introduce this question,
which is, if you look at what's happened, for example,
in the game of chess or the game of go,
what's happened is that Ai has come along beat the
world champion, but all the human players have gotten better
as a result, all the chess players in the world
are better players now because they're training with AI. They're
(37:58):
taking new hints and strategies from AI in both chess
and go. And I've been very interested in what writers
will do, and I'm very curious about things that maybe
just haven't been intuited over the last couple of millennia.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
But we will realize, Hey, there's this whole new thing
we can do here. Have you thought about this topic.
We'll bound to be wrong whenever we say, I guess
there's a couple of interesting analogs. Right, You've mentioned one
the world of go and chess. Another is photography. So
photography comes in in the nineteenth century, and some answersts
(38:39):
are a little worried by that because you know, for
some folks they saw themselves as being in the business
of representing the world of sort of producing a faithful depiction.
You mean painters, Yes, painters. Not everyone saw themselves in that,
but just as some did. And so it's kind of
an interesting challenge. Now, notice that you can go two ways.
(39:03):
Some folks became photography artists. Right, We're going to take
this new medium and exploit it for what it can
do in the world was, you know, not just thinking
of it as a kind of information gathering information gathering machine,
but hey, you know, we can scratch the photo. We
can you know, we can overexpose it. We're not under
(39:23):
exposed it. We can solarize it. All kinds of cool things, right,
or we can we can make photographs that are kind
of surreal by juxtaposing things, all kinds of fantastic stuff
in the domain of photography. But another very different trajectory
consists of artists who are saying I'm going to do
a thing that photography can't do, right, and that happens
(39:45):
not only in photography, but interestingly also in literature. Of
people even in literature are saying, well, this whole, this
whole business photography is making me think literature shouldn't be
photography either. Metaphorically speaking, literature shouldn't just be a kind
of well, you know what, there are five houses on
that street and one of them is read right, Okay,
(40:06):
you're fine, you know, you take your camera out and
you can you can transmit that information. I think we
could potentially anticipate one or both of those things happening
with the world of AI, so you could potentially imagine
people taking this AI thing and making interesting as ounce
of it. And I've seen some cases of that, but
(40:28):
you could also, hopefully, I would like to think, imagine novelists,
filmmakers and TV show ritss and so on saying themselves, Okay,
this is an opportunity to think about what's special and
distinctive about the medium that we have. What is it
that we do that this technology can't do, and to
(40:52):
try to really lean into that and push that to
its limit.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
I love that and just a flesh set out, you know,
with painting that led to the Impressionists and the surrealists
and the Cubists and so on, because they said, look,
photo can't do this. That's we're going to move into
that realm there. And so it's very interesting to me.
I can tell when I'm reading substack articles, I can
tell who's just popped out of chat GYPTV who's really
(41:20):
written it, because at least right now, there still exists
a pretty big difference and you can tell human writing
and it's so lovely. I feel like it's more appreciated
than ever now.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yeah that's true, Thank goodness, right, and you know it's Yeah,
it's an opportunity obviously a bunch of things are happening,
some are good, some not so good. But whatever, whatever
is happening, it's an opportunity for rest All to think about, Okay,
why is it we value what we value? Why do
we value I totally value it when an actual person
wrote it right. Somebody said, watched I bother reading if
(41:52):
you couldn't even be bothered to write it? And I
think there's something about our relationship to Jane Austen, to
Tony Morrison, to Marssell proof to these writers that we
love spending time around too. Great filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman.
There's something of a connection that we establish with them,
almost a communion that we establish with them across their artwork,
(42:15):
which is just not going to be the case with
AI generated material. Now. You know, in some cases, like
I'm a big fan of pop music, and I often
care who wrote a song, but I don't always care
who wrote a song right. So there are some cases
where that's not necessarily the most important thing that's going
(42:35):
on in the transaction, But there are other cases where
it clearly is absolutely essential.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Also, I would assert that as possible that you maybe
care that the song was written by somebody.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
And part of this plugs is great.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Yeah, part of the plugs into what I'm calling the
effort phenomenon, which is just that we really care about
the effort that's gone into something. And so when we
look at Proust writing three thousand page novel and we
imagine the years or possibly decades.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
That it took him to do that.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
You know, I could generate a three thousand page thing
on chat GPT and you say, what a waste.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
I can't believe you'd actually want someone to read that.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah, So it's the it's our understanding of what he
did to get there that makes the difference. And by
the way, this is why I, for example, you know,
I give public lectures and I'm not at all worried
about that going away because people really care.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
I think, possibly now more than.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Ever, about seeing a human, you know, and having that
human fly across the country and stand on that stage
where I can see them.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
That makes a big difference. That's a great point. And
then of course the Q and A where you yeah,
you're not chat gptaying it. Yeah, it's real you, yeah,
real them. I love this point, and it can be
much more imperfect one of the abogies give this. I
gave this analogy on on an episode a while ago.
But there's this interesting thing with synthetic diamonds. Now, you
(44:01):
can in a laboratory generate a synthetic diamond that is perfect,
that has no flaws in it, but still people care
about the real thing with the flaws and won't pay
much more money for it because, in a sense, Mother
Nature put a billion years of effort into making that thing,
as opposed to five days in the lab. That's a
lovely analogy. I love that. I always think of Michelangelo's
(44:21):
Sistine Champel ceiling. I mean, it's intrinsically beautiful, but part
of what we're experiencing is how did he do that?
The virtue walcity is part of the experience. Yeah, how
did you do that? How did Michael Angelier pay the
Sisting Champel ceiling? How did Tony Morrison manage to pull
that incredible trick on us? And it's not just a
cheap trick. Yeah, it's a trick that moves us. It's
(44:44):
a trick that challenges us. It's a trick that makes
us relate to the world in a different way. It's
extraordinaring and you just have to take your hat off
to Tony Morrison, and that is an experience of a
human being that cannot be replicated through technology.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
That was my interview with my colleague at stand for,
Joshua Landy, as we talked about just a few of
the issues that surface in our course literature and the brain.
And so this brings me back to the beginning of
the podcast, to my kitchen where my daughter sits frozen,
her eyes darting around while her head is locked on
(45:22):
a page, and she is living in a world with
a monkey and a cat in outer space. Her body
is in the here and now, but her mind is elsewhere.
And that I think is the extraordinary magic of literature.
It takes the most advanced piece of biological hardware in
the known universe, the brain, and invites it to simulate
(45:47):
entire worlds, to run experiments in alternate lives, to dance
with ambiguity, and to revise its assumptions again and again.
What literature offers us isn't just entertainment. It's a rehearsal
space for empathy, for introspection, for humility. It teaches us
(46:08):
that our first instincts can be wrong, that people are
more complicated than they seem, that the world sometimes resists
tidy packaging, and the active reading becomes a kind of
cognitive calisthenics, one that exercises the mental muscles we need
in a complex, unpredictable society. We need curiosity and perspective taking,
(46:33):
and nuance and self doubt. So writers, most of whom
presumably had no training in neuroscience, have for millennia intuited
how to guide our attention, how to play on our biases,
how to surprise and disarm us, how to steer us
down garden paths, and how to leave us saying, oh,
(46:55):
my god, of course that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
These aren't just parlor tricks.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
These are acts of generosity, because what they offer us
is the chance to rewire ourselves to become slightly different,
slightly better versions of who we were before we picked
up the book. And that's why we might worry just
a little about the declining time that many people, especially
(47:21):
young people, are spending in the deep space of novels.
This is not because video games or tiktoks or youtubes
are inherently bad, but because they rarely offer the same
rigor of cognitive training. These short form things aren't generally
built to cultivate ambiguity or to stretch empathy across chapters
(47:45):
or lifetimes. Some might do it once in a while,
but novels specialize in it. So let's make sure we
don't lose the habit. Let's remember the strange human superpower
that we've developed to sit still, to decode squiggles on
a page, and to be emotionally transformed by people who
(48:05):
never existed. Let's honor the decades long effort that a
great author might spend to gift us with one transcendent moment.
And let's recognize that reading literature isn't passive consumption.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
It's active simulation. It's mental travel in time and space.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
It's the brain doing what it does best, building models
of the world, running them forward, learning, updating, and every
once in a while feeling awe. So the next time
use it down with a good novel, know this, you're
not wasting time. You're going to the cognitive gym to
(48:49):
become a stronger human. Go to Eagleman dot com slash
podcast for more and and to find further reading. Check
out my newsletter on substack and be a part of
the online chats there and you can watch videos of
Inner Cosmos on YouTube, or you can leave comments.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.
Why do brains love stories? How do brains move so
easily from assessing reality out there to slipping into totally
made up worlds that you know are made up? What
do authors of great literature have in common with stage
magicians and comedians? And what does any of this have
(00:26):
to do with cognitive shortcuts? Or how the brain is
a prediction machine? Or Marcel Proust or Tony Morrison or
Jane Austen, or why jokes always come in threes. Welcome
to enter cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist
(00:46):
and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we
sail deeply into our three pound universe to uncover some
of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode
(01:13):
is about why humans read books. I was watching my
young daughter the other day. She loves to jump around
and dance and be on the move, but she was
sitting stock still in the kitchen, staring at symbols of
strange shapes written on a page, something like hieroglyphics or
(01:33):
weird squiggles. Now, it just so happens that English is
the language that I speak and read, so the squiggles
of that alphabet don't look strange to me.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
My brain has overtrained on them so that.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
They immediately carry meaning, and my daughter, in the last
several years, has also overtrained on them. But obviously, if
I were from another place on the planet, I would
see these only as weird squiggles. Anyway, she was staring
at these and was obviously transported internally to another world.
(02:08):
Even though she was sitting in our kitchen, her mind
was elsewhere. Now this is strange because any neuroscience textbook
that you read, including my own, will assert that brains
are all about gathering information from their environment. Your eyes
are scanning for threats and opportunities in front of you.
(02:32):
Your ears are listening, your nose is smelling, your skin
is registering information. All of it is about monitoring what
is happening around you. And yet it is extraordinarily easy
for us to stare at these cryptic symbols and be
transported into completely new worlds. In this case, my daughter
(02:55):
was in the life of somebody else. Specifically, she was
on a long trip through space with a cat and
a monkey.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
That's what her brain thought. At least for the most part.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It wasn't so aware of the details of the kitchen
and the sounds around her. Instead, most of the processing
hardware was busy living in this other world, one which
had its own trials and tribulations, and, by the way,
one which doesn't actually exist, but which nonetheless has no
(03:28):
problem making her laugh and cry and occupy all of
her attention. So this kind of thing got me wondering
a long time ago about why it is so easy
for us to slip into other worlds, and more importantly,
into other characters' lives and to experience their situation and
(03:51):
their emotions. So to this point, one of the classes
I teach at Stanford is called Literature and the Brain.
I co teach this with a wonderful colleague of mine,
doctor Joshua Landy, who works in the Comparative Literature department.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
For years, josh.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
And I have both been obsessed from different angles about
the big picture of how and why stories pervade all
human cultures, and not only are they there, but they're
the main thing that characterizes the culture. We are more
than information gatherers. We are a very particular type of
information gatherer, and universally, it seems that the optimal way
(04:34):
to swallow the jagged pill of information is to wrap
it in story. So here's my interview with my colleague
Joshua Landy. So, josh you and I have known each
other for a long time and for many years now
we've been teaching a class at Stanford called Literature and
(04:55):
the Brain, and that's proven to be a very popular class.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Happily people are in thanks to you. Yeah, thanks to you.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
And so I'm you know, I'm a neuroscientist. You're in
the comparative literature department. But I love literature. You love
cognitive science, and so that's what's put us together.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
It's been very fruitful.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
So today let's talk about You have a statement that
you make, which is that cognitive biases, which are all
the funny things that our brain does when they're taking
shortcuts and so on, that these are a writer's best friend.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
So let's start there. What do you mean by that? Yeah,
so you've written beautifully about these quirks of the human brain,
right that it's constantly making shortcuts because we just don't
have the glucose, we don't have the energy, we don't
have the time to be thinking everything through down to
the last detail. So we have to make little cognitive
(05:48):
shortcuts rules of thumb to get us through our day.
And for the most part these were great, But I'm
gonna and again they get us into a little bit
of trouble, and sometimes it's fun trouble, right, That's the
basis of some jokes. Some of these jokes depend on
tempting the listener into making a certain kind of mistake.
(06:09):
So it's an example of such a joke, well, one
of Mike's. It's not particularly funny joke, but it's a
good example, which is the pot is in the kitchen cabinet,
don't smoke it all at once. This is an example
of a garden path joke, or as Americans say, garden
path joke. What you're doing is you're tempting the listener
(06:30):
to think that you're saying a particular thing. Well, the
pot is in the kitchen cabinet. If it's the kitchen cabinet,
it must be some kind of utensil. But not haha,
the joke's on you. Obviously that's not what it was
in the first place. So this is a case where
you're exploiting a certain tendency on the part of the brain,
which is to kind of you know, project out into
(06:52):
the future, to predict things, to fill things in when
they're not fully given to you, which we need in
our daily lives.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Exactly the brain. The brain, of course, there's a prediction machine.
And that's because the world is so complex, and really
the art of growing up and the job of brain
plasticity is to say, ah, okay, this is the likely
next token, as we would phrase it now in the
age of llms, but it's to say.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
This is the likely thing that's going to happen next. Yeah.
You have a good example of a joke, and in
that vein the doctor joke, Oh yeah, I heard that
from a comedian a long time ago.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
He said, I went to the doctor and the doctor said, okay,
take off your clothes and put him there in the
corner next to mine.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
There you go. And the reason it works as a
joke is.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Because we have an internal model of the world and
all that language, ever is, is throwing small bits of
data over the transom and we say, oh, I got it,
I've got this word, I've got the next word. Great,
I can put together this very rich model of what's
going on.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
So we never expected that.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
And this is the notion of the garden path, And
so how do writers exploit this cognitive bias exactly right?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
So that you know, these great riances will often tempt
you to make certain kinds of prediction, and then they'll,
you know, pull the rug out of mone of you.
And sometimes it's in jokes, because often that rule of
three where you sort of say the first thing, say
a second similar thing established as a pattern. Now we're
fully predicting that the third thing is going to be
(08:25):
the same, and then ha ha, no joke's on you.
Sometimes it's serious. So one of my favorite examples is
from Madame Bowin. I don't want to spoil too much
about the plot here, so I'll just say a particular
unfortunate thing happens, and then a very similar and fortunate
happened thing happens again. And so by the time you're
in a third similar situation, you're fully expecting this is
(08:47):
probably not going to go very well, right, So so
this can be for humorous effect, but can also be
for very serious effect. These great riances are setting us
up to make certain predictions about what's going to come next,
which they can then satisfy or undermine.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
That's exactly right. So it's used in literary fiction. It's
also used in genre fiction. Obviously, in any sort of
mystery book, what or thriller. What the author is doing
is saying, Okay, look at this, look at this, look
at this, and he or she is just making sure
that we make particular kinds of predictions. And then at
(09:26):
the end they say, ha ha, it's actually this other
thing that you totally miss because we led you down
the garden path.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Which brings me to another cognitiviance that writes this can exploit,
which is selective attention. So this is of course the
staple of stage magic, right that magicians I don't even
I mean I sort of know how they do it,
but I basically don't know how they do it because
it's extraordinary. But they're able to exploit the fact that
(09:52):
our our brains cannot attend to everything at once in
order to hide things almost in plain sight, like close
up magic. They're right in front of you, and yet
you have no idea how they did this thing they did. Interestingly,
literary writers can do the same thing, and this is
one of my favorite phenomena in literature, the experience of
(10:12):
oh my god, of course, and so how do you
pull that off? Right? How do you pull off the
experience for the reader or the viewer of Oh my God?
Of course? Well, essentially you have to put something in
your movie, in your TV show, in your novel that's
visible just enough so that the viewer remembers it later on.
(10:33):
What's an example? All right? So, one of not just
my favorite novels, but I know your favorite novels because
we teach it together in our class is Tony Morrison's
novel Song of Solomon. And I'm not going to say
too much about the plot here. It's just be a
very mild spoiler. There is a fantastic scene right at
the beginning of the novel where you see this guy
(10:56):
at the top of a tall building with these homemade
wings on his back, and he's announced to everybody he's
gonna fly. He's gonna take off from the tower and fly,
and you're kind of worried that he's not actually gonna fly.
It's gonna go very badly for him. Meanwhile, somebody's going
into labor down on the ground, and somebody else expills
(11:18):
this this basket full of homemade petals and all kinds
of stuff is going on it's a bright colors, the
blue wings, the white snow, the red petals, the woman
going into labor, the man at risk of dying, and
by the way, somebody's singing a song. Now, this song
is going to turn out to be very important much
(11:40):
later on in the novel. And indeed the song is
in the title of the novel. But I will bet
you dollars to donuts that the vast majority of readers
just do not notice the song, or they notice it
just enough that when it comes back towards the end
of the novel, they're like, oh my god, that song.
(12:00):
But it's hidden in plain sight because you're attending to
this potential death, and you're attending to the birth, and
you're attending to the spilling of the petals and the
colors and everything else. Brilliant. It's a kind of genius
move on the part of Tony Morris. Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
And just to flesh out of this idea of selective attention,
you know, let's let's take visual attention.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
It's like a little spotlight and you.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Can make it narrow or you can make it slightly wider,
but everything outside of your field of attention you just
completely miss and hence all these things. Everyone's seen these
on the internet. At this, you know, inattentional blindness, where
you're trying, you're paying attention to something and as a
result of that, you don't see something else, like the
guy in the gorilla suit who walks in and beats
(12:46):
his chest. So, and of course this is why it
works with magic, because the magician does something.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
You know, magicians do this thing.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Instead of moving their hands and straight lines, they typically
do it in a curve. And I don't know, this
is just something they picked up on a while ago
that you just can't help but watch if someone's hand
does something, you think, hey, that hand is up to something,
and your.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Attention goes to that.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Even if your eyeballs are watching the thing they're supposed
to be watching, your attention is on the hand moving.
And so then the magician can do whatever they want
outside of your field of attention. And so this is
indeed related to the garden path issue because the writer
gets to drop clues on things, but just so long
(13:29):
as making sure that your attention is elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Yeah, okay, good.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
So these are things that neuroscientists have been studying for
a long time and novelists have been exploiting presumably for
much longer that neuroscientists have been studying this.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
That is right, and that's an important point, right. The
thought is not that, you know, Shakespeare gotten a time
machine and traveled to the twentieth or twenty first century
and read a bunch of cogni science. No, but you know,
honests tend to work great art sent to work intuitively.
They have this intuitive sense of what's gonna land. How
(14:05):
obviously the same it's the stage magicians. Stage magic's been
around for a very long time. It got a kind
of you know, it entered its sort of modern phase
in the nineteenth century with people like Udin long name,
but that's Houdini named himself after this guy, and he
was he was the first one to really transform into
(14:26):
something kind of professional where he wasn't pretending to summon spirits.
He called his tricks experiments as though he were a scientist.
Wow magician. So anyway, this is a kind of digression
into something that I'm excited about, but it's not totally
on topic. But the main point is all of these
folks have this intuitive sense, based on experience of how
(14:49):
you get things to land. In a certain way, and
now we have all these wonderful scientists like you who
are explaining why they got it right.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
You know, it makes me wonder when magicians, let's say
a thousand years ago, performing to the king and maybe
summoning spirits, whatever they were doing.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
But it makes me wonder what vocabulary they used among
one another?
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Did they talk about the spotlight of attention in some way?
Did they intuit the mechanism as much as the what
to do about it?
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I mean, we don't have all the records of what
we would need for that, especially as magicians keep diffe.
It's interesting wonder about.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Authors though, Let's say a thousand years ago, an author
who dropped clues over here but wanted to make sure
the audience's tension was over there.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
I wonder how they described.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
That when they, let's say, taught small seminar classes to
other authors, how do they talk about it?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So we don't have those records, but it's very interesting
to read what people are saying, you know, in the
late nineteth century, early twentieth century, because that we have
a bunch of people's letters, and we have people's essays,
and you know, one of my Favorites is an essay
by my favorite novelist, Marcel Proust, author of the three
thousand page be Off in Search of Lost Time. Have
(16:04):
you read the whole thing? Oh? Yeah, many times? Wow?
How long does it take you to go through the
first time? It took me seven years. Yeah, it's you know,
it's an investment. But that's well, that's part of what
you and I think about in the classes. You know,
why do we make those investments? And it's not just
for entertainment, and it's not irrational, it's completely irrational where
(16:26):
there are huge benefits that we get from the time
that we spend in our loving engagement with novels and
TV shows and movies that are that are challenging, not
just the ones that wear cars blow up. But to
go back to your question, you know, Pruce writes this
essay on Flaubert, the nineteenth century novelist, and he says,
you know, you're My favorite line in Flaubert is he
traveled two words sentence. It's a two words sentence, and
(16:53):
what Prusce loves about it is the use of verb tense,
so that this novel that is talking about by Flaubert, sorry,
sentimental education suddenly shifts from this kind of gradual imperfect
tense where things are kind of moving slowly and you
have maybe one hundred pages for an afternoon to this
(17:17):
He traveled, where you're compressing ten years into two words. Oh,
so you have these really interesting instances of writing just
talking about their craft, and they will talk about things
like that. They will say, you know, think about the
verb tenses using think about the way in which you're
handling time. Think about the point of view in the
novel and how it can shift, and how you can
(17:37):
trick the reader. I mean, that's a big thing in Flaubert,
and also in Jane Austen, tricking the She doesn't we
don't have the as far as I know, the records
of her talking about this, but it's clear in Flaubert
these writers are deliberately tricking us. They are tricking us
into thinking that some sequence of words is said to
(17:58):
you by the author and a ratre and it's just true,
when in reality it's actually just somebody's point of view.
And this turns out to be really good for us,
And why do you think it's good for us? So
this is another way in which, you know, I think
writers can in a salutary way exploit the frailties of
(18:20):
our cognitive apparatus, right, so why is it good for us?
You know, we encounter some kind of claim in a
work of fiction. A good example in Jane Austen's Pride
and Prejudice. There's a scene where this I borrow from
my friend and colleague Nnie Anderson. There's this scene where
Elizabeth Bennett is looking talking to mister Darcy, and everyone
(18:44):
will remember this from the novel of the Fantastic TV adaptation,
and she's talking to about this, this horrible situation with
her sister, and everyone's afraid of it and afraid what's
going to happen? And Darcy says something, and then the
line is a deeper shape of auteur spread across his features. Oh,
he's even more arrogant and supercilious than he ever was before.
(19:07):
He's disgusted. What a horrible family. These guys are trailer trash.
You know what am I getting myself involved in? Turns
out much later than the novel, It wasn't out at all.
So his expression did change. He was thinking about something,
he was feeling something. What was he feeling? Concern? He
was feeling all kinds of possib feelings. He was feeling concern,
(19:29):
he was thinking about his own situation. He happened to
know this bad guy that's involved in the situation. In
other words, this little, just this little sentence, this little
innocent looking sentence that looks like it's a statement of
fact about what's happening in the novel turns out to
be Elizabeth's point of view. Why is that good for us?
(19:49):
Because well, look, the whole novel is about pride and prejudice.
It's not just about the pride and prejudice of the characters,
it's about ours. Why did we we so quick to
interpret the sentence that way? Because we're prejudiced because we
have an existing belief about who Darcy is and what
kind of character he has, and he can't possibly be different,
(20:11):
he can't possibly be changed. Guess what we're wrong?
Speaker 1 (20:32):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
It strikes me this is part of the passage.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Into maturity that we all go through as humans, is
learning that our first interpretation of something in life is
not necessarily what we thought it was.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
But we have these.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Internal models, and it's so hard to get over when
we think that someone's just given us a mean look
or something. I see my daughter who's in the fourth
grade now constantly come home and say, oh, so and
so looked or did this thing, And I think, gosh,
there are probably many interpretations for what happened there, right,
But all we ever live inside of is our internal model.
And one thing the brain is good at doing is
(21:08):
coming to conclusions. Instead of saying, well, there's a whole
table of hypotheses here that I could hold on to,
it collapses down to one theory about what just happened.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
I totally agree with you, and I think that's one
of the enormous benefits of novel reading generally. I mean, obviously, again,
you could read novels just you know, sort of light,
fluffy stuff. You can read it for pleasure. Is nothing
wrong with that, But the kind that really challenge us,
like like J. Nausten's novels, like Tony Marshall's novels, like
Flaubert's novels, Proof three thousand page Meema, they do us
(21:43):
this enormous favorite. Milan Kundera talks about it. As you know,
reality is always more complicated than you think, and novels,
I think, get us into a better state of mind.
About that by what I think of as handing our
rear end to.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Us, so as in making you think, okay, I've got this,
I understand exactly what's going on, and then realizing, wow,
I really misinterpreted exactly. It's practice at real life in
that way, practice at real life.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Yeah, and it you know, if you do enough of it,
if you get into a kind of habit of novel reading,
you're more likely to be just a little slower and
jumping to these conclusions. And I think this habit of
reading these interesting novels that challenge us and pull a
rug out from under us should make us a little
bit more circumspect.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Exactly because the novel is like a sandbox that you
get to play in, and you get to follow these
trajectories and say, oh.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Yeah, things can turn out.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
I expect it, and yes, it strengthens our muscles for
realizing that can happen in real life.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
You know, I just posted on my substack this issue.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
We've talked about this study before about how reading even
short bits of literature can expand your empathy and your
ability to see other people. This is a related issue
because it's allowing you to see not only what someone
else might be thinking, but what the whole situation could
be and how you misinterpreted it.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
By the way, there's a good.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Example in the movie Oppenheimert where Robert Downey Junior's character
Lewis Strauss he's going to say something to Oppenheimer and
Albert Einstein passes him and looks very angry, and so
Strauss takes that personally and believes that Oppenheimer has just
(23:28):
said something to Einstein against him, and the whole movie
he hates Oppenheimer in part because of this, And at
the very end of the movie, I hope this is
a this is a minor spoiler, but at the very
end of the movie we find out that this wasn't
at all why Einstein had this concerned look on his face.
It's because Oppenheimer had just told him about the nuclear
(23:50):
bomb test and Einstein pictured the whole world going up
in flames and was so struck and depressed. Why this
vision he had of what was what the future was
that he walked by, And when Strauss said hello, Einstein
didn't even respond to him. And so we as the
audience find out that this misinterpretation has been with Strauss
(24:14):
for his whole career because of this, this one moment.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
That's a great example, and you know, it reminds us
that these works of fiction makes self correction pleasurable. Right.
And of course, you know, we make mistakes all the
time in real life too, and sometimes we get our
rear ends handed twists in real life too, but that's
not pleasurable. But in fiction it's you know, oh wow,
(24:38):
oh that's so interesting. And I think that kind of
makes you know, it makes it go down easier, right,
It makes us associate recognizing the limits of our capacities
to know things with pleasure or at least not discomfort.
And I think that's that's going to be good for
us in the long run. In other way, it's the
(24:59):
other sign to what we're talking about at the beginning
about how rights can exploit biases. This is a way
in which runs us can gently push back against biases. Right,
these ways that we have of just distorting reality, of
getting things wrong, of thinking we know everything when we don't.
You can't completely undo that rain is what it is,
(25:21):
but you can gently nudge back against it and make
us a little bit better equipped to deal with the
world and each other. So let me ask you this.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
You know, everybody's fictions of the future are always incorrect
in terms of how will kids be consuming entertainment in
the future. But one thing that does seem a little
bit of a problem is that there's a lot more
video game playing and a lot less novel reading.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
And the question is if we take that to its extreme.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
I don't know if that'll actually happen, but if kids
didn't read any literature and instead they just played role
playing action games, what is lost there?
Speaker 2 (25:57):
So I don't want to not all video games. I
think there are actually some really interesting ones. There are
some very interesting games where you have choices to make
and at the end the game tells you this is
what you chose. How do you feel about that? So
there are actually some very interesting cases. But I do
think nonetheless, even with the best video games out there, Look,
(26:18):
each of our modes or cultural modes, has its own affordances,
has its own specific things to offer. So video games
have a particular thing to offer, but novels have this
particular thing to offer, and this particular trick that Jane
Austen pulls and that Flaubert Polls and other writers pull,
you kind of can't do that as well in other things.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Including by the way, TikTok videos or Instagram or tweet them.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Yeah, that concerns me just a little bit because investing
maybe not a three thousand page novel, but investing in
a novel and you think you have an interpretation, then
you find out that was wrong.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
I just don't know if you can get that through
other media. I think it's right, I think especially short films. Right,
there are certain effects that can only be produced at
a certain length. Certain emotions require time to produce. Not
all emotions, but some emotions, you know, gosh, you have
to you need to spend the time of the characters
to get so invested that you will be profoundly affected
(27:18):
by their death in a story, for example. Right, So
there's a variety of things that kind of only really
work or work out their strongest if you're reading a
novel a couple hundred pages, maybe three thousand, let's tone
it down a few undred pages. But similarly, you know,
films have particular things to offer, and TV shows are
(27:38):
particular things to.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Offer exactly right, And you can watch a multi season
television show and get that same sort of effect out
of it. Yes, although I do want I just read
a statistic that YouTube, the revenue that YouTube makes swamps
Netflix and Disney and everyone else. And you know, they
tend to be standalone things. You know, they're getting longer, interesting,
(28:00):
like half an hour in length. But I you know, look,
I'm not a cultural pessimist. I think that generally speaking,
you know, each generation is good at some things and
bad as of other things. And you know it's foolish
to say, ah, the kids these days, things going to hell, right,
So there are some great things happening now. But I
(28:23):
also want to say, on the other side of that,
I think we need to try to hang on to
the practice of engaging with long form works of fiction,
long form works in nonfiction as well. But in the
context of our conversation, I don't want the world to
devolve into just tiktoks or you know, a two minute
(28:45):
YouTube video one after the other after the other. There
are things that we're losing if we lose that.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
I agreed.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Are there any other cognitive biases that writers exploit?
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yeah, so one obvious one is the peak end, which
Conoman talks about. So that's the phenomenon where if you're
thinking about an experience that lasted for a certain length
of time. Let's say you went to Paris for a
week and somebody asks you, how was Paris. You're very likely,
(29:16):
you know, if you want to give like a one
would answer it was great. It was Paris. Of course
it was great. But you know, you're going to be
more influenced by the experience at its peak and the
experience at its sense. So whatever the last thing was
you did in Paris, and then whatever was either the
greatest thing or the most horrible thing that happened in Paris.
That affects our reading of literature too. It makes endings
(29:40):
unusually important. Right, A great ending can almost save a
mediocre work of art, and a terrible edd it can
ruin what was otherwise a great work of art. So
that's one another one which Viera Tobin has talked about,
just this brilliant theory about this thing called the curse
of knowledge and the curse of knowledg Knowledge is basically
(30:01):
this phenomenon where once you know something, it becomes more
difficult for you to imagine not knowing it. And it
even applies to yourself of five minutes ago. So when
when you're watching a quiz show and they give the answer,
you think, ah, I should have known that, because now
you know it, and so vera. Tobin says, this is
(30:23):
one of the ways in which twists work in literature
and in movies, that you want the reader or viewer
to have this experience of of course it was Jimmy.
Of course it was Jimmy. I should have known all along.
But you don't want people to figure out it was
(30:44):
Jimmy after five minutes. And that's a difficult thing to
pull off as a writer or a screenwriter. So Tobin says, well, look,
you exploit the curse of knowledge. You drop a few
breadcrumbs around where you know it could be Jimmy, and
by the time time you get to the end you
reveal it's Jimmy. Because of the curse of knowledge, the
viewer is going to say, oh, that's such a satisfying
(31:06):
of of course it was Jimmy. So these are a
couple more of these little quirks of our cognitive apparatus
that writers can exploit to delight and challenge and and
and push us not just out of our comfort zone,
terrific and.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
So for other biases that writers can exploit, what about priming.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
What is priming great? So priming is a phenomenon where
basically exposure to a given stimulus makes subsequent related stimuli
more salient. So that's a lot of jargon. The basic
thought is that if you've just seen a wolf and
you're walking around in the forest, then some sudden rustling
(31:45):
might make you think that's another wolf. Right, You're going
to be more sensitive either to real or even imagined
phenomena that are that are similar to what you've just experienced.
So this shows up in all kinds of ways in
literary texts. You can get people to anticipate things, whether
they're going to be there or not. Priming works in
(32:09):
some surprising ways.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
So for example, if you you know, if you if
you flash up on a screen for fraction of a
second the word eight, people will be quicker.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
As in E E I G H D I G
H T got it. People with quicker to notice the
number eight. That's straightforward. But they'll also be quicker to
notice things that rhyme with that. And here's a really
wild one. If you flash up the word towed t
O W E D as in they towed my car yesterday,
(32:45):
people are going to be quicker at recognizing the word frog.
Why because obviously t O w D sounds a bit
like t O A D the wart amphibian. So that's fascinating.
Then what's going on in there? Somehow the brain is
registering this, translate it into sounds and then generating associations
based on those sounds, and.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
All that's happening under the hood. And and what this
tells us, by the way, is that all this activity
is constantly churning under the hood, even when we have
no idea.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Word flashes and I mean just.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Exactly all the pathways that are tickled as a result
of that exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
So then this is a delicious thing for poets to exploit. Yeah,
so Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Sonnet seven is a sonnet that is
basically a sonnet about how how much it sucks to
geld and it's it compares, you know, the search dijectorial
(33:43):
life to the sun rising being high in the sky
and then setting and and and the speaker basically says,
you know, sounds pretty glorious when it rises, and then
it's really powerful. Everyone's in all of the sun when
it's at its height. But then when it goes down
and doesn't give a monkey's about it anymore. And this
is my situation, David, just kid. But here's the cool thing.
(34:08):
The last coumpl it is so thou thyself outgoing in
thy noon, unlooked on, diest unless thou hast a son.
So what the speaker saying is, you're going to be
in the situation of that son as it sets, where
no one cares about you. You're going to be going
(34:30):
to die unlooked on. People aren't going to pay any
attention to you unless you have a child, Unless you
have a son. This comes out of nowhere in the poem, right,
there's nothing at all about love or marriage or procreation. Nothing.
Suddenly the speaker's like, so anyway, you should have children,
but specifically a son, specifically a son. And I hope
(34:53):
you see where I'm going with this. On the one end,
it comes out of nowhere, But on the other end
doesn't feel like it comes out of nowhere. Why because
we've been hearing the entire time about the sun s
U N And that works on us exactly the same
way that tweed works on us. And it makes the
word sun feel completely natural. Yeah, we're primed to sort
(35:15):
of half expect the word s O n son.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
So this comes back to the question I asked before,
which is how in the world when Shakespeare or the
different authors who we summarized Shakespeare, when they sat around
and talked about this sort of thing, how did they
How did they? Was it just an intuition that word
feels right there?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Possibly? I think we don't know enough abounce it. Uh,
you know, we have some we have some writ things
from for example, seventeenth century France. They were there's a
big period of thinking hard about dramatic technique in particular,
so there's lots of raging debates about how you do
things and why there are stuff we have from tenth
(36:11):
century Kashmir. So one of my fantastic former students now
teaching at Claremont works on two guys named Ibnvagupta Ananda Vardner,
and they're thinking about how do you produce poetry that
elicits certain experiences, particularly emotional experiences in viewers, listeners, readers.
So at certain times, in certain places you get actual
(36:34):
explicit reflection on it, sometimes really insightful. But I think
it's really the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in at least
in the European tradition that people really start digging in
to a bunch of these things, and so we can
you know, we could be absolutely sure that Flaubert was
thinking about the way his sentences sounded and their shape,
(36:56):
and Prus was thinking about verb tenses. And that's something
that is clearly happening. You know, as these as these
crafts sort of become more professionalized and people are thinking
about what they're doing. The central point for us is, yes,
these many of these folks were just intuitive, aren'tists. They
(37:17):
had a feeling this is how it's going to work,
sometimes just by trying it on themselves.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
So this makes me think of something which is as
a field, neuroscience constantly thinks, hey, we're just covering on things.
Often there are plenty of examples scattered through the millennia
where we see people have.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Thought about these topics before. So here's the question I
have for you.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Let me take one step back to introduce this question,
which is, if you look at what's happened, for example,
in the game of chess or the game of go,
what's happened is that Ai has come along beat the
world champion, but all the human players have gotten better
as a result, all the chess players in the world
are better players now because they're training with AI. They're
(37:58):
taking new hints and strategies from AI in both chess
and go. And I've been very interested in what writers
will do, and I'm very curious about things that maybe
just haven't been intuited over the last couple of millennia.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
But we will realize, Hey, there's this whole new thing
we can do here. Have you thought about this topic.
We'll bound to be wrong whenever we say, I guess
there's a couple of interesting analogs. Right, You've mentioned one
the world of go and chess. Another is photography. So
photography comes in in the nineteenth century, and some answersts
(38:39):
are a little worried by that because you know, for
some folks they saw themselves as being in the business
of representing the world of sort of producing a faithful depiction.
You mean painters, Yes, painters. Not everyone saw themselves in that,
but just as some did. And so it's kind of
an interesting challenge. Now, notice that you can go two ways.
(39:03):
Some folks became photography artists. Right, We're going to take
this new medium and exploit it for what it can
do in the world was, you know, not just thinking
of it as a kind of information gathering information gathering machine,
but hey, you know, we can scratch the photo. We
can you know, we can overexpose it. We're not under
(39:23):
exposed it. We can solarize it. All kinds of cool things, right,
or we can we can make photographs that are kind
of surreal by juxtaposing things, all kinds of fantastic stuff
in the domain of photography. But another very different trajectory
consists of artists who are saying I'm going to do
a thing that photography can't do, right, and that happens
(39:45):
not only in photography, but interestingly also in literature. Of
people even in literature are saying, well, this whole, this
whole business photography is making me think literature shouldn't be
photography either. Metaphorically speaking, literature shouldn't just be a kind
of well, you know what, there are five houses on
that street and one of them is read right, Okay,
(40:06):
you're fine, you know, you take your camera out and
you can you can transmit that information. I think we
could potentially anticipate one or both of those things happening
with the world of AI, so you could potentially imagine
people taking this AI thing and making interesting as ounce
of it. And I've seen some cases of that, but
(40:28):
you could also, hopefully, I would like to think, imagine novelists,
filmmakers and TV show ritss and so on saying themselves, Okay,
this is an opportunity to think about what's special and
distinctive about the medium that we have. What is it
that we do that this technology can't do, and to
(40:52):
try to really lean into that and push that to
its limit.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
I love that and just a flesh set out, you know,
with painting that led to the Impressionists and the surrealists
and the Cubists and so on, because they said, look,
photo can't do this. That's we're going to move into
that realm there. And so it's very interesting to me.
I can tell when I'm reading substack articles, I can
tell who's just popped out of chat GYPTV who's really
(41:20):
written it, because at least right now, there still exists
a pretty big difference and you can tell human writing
and it's so lovely. I feel like it's more appreciated
than ever now.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yeah that's true, Thank goodness, right, and you know it's Yeah,
it's an opportunity obviously a bunch of things are happening,
some are good, some not so good. But whatever, whatever
is happening, it's an opportunity for rest All to think about, Okay,
why is it we value what we value? Why do
we value I totally value it when an actual person
wrote it right. Somebody said, watched I bother reading if
(41:52):
you couldn't even be bothered to write it? And I
think there's something about our relationship to Jane Austen, to
Tony Morrison, to Marssell proof to these writers that we
love spending time around too. Great filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman.
There's something of a connection that we establish with them,
almost a communion that we establish with them across their artwork,
(42:15):
which is just not going to be the case with
AI generated material. Now. You know, in some cases, like
I'm a big fan of pop music, and I often
care who wrote a song, but I don't always care
who wrote a song right. So there are some cases
where that's not necessarily the most important thing that's going
(42:35):
on in the transaction, But there are other cases where
it clearly is absolutely essential.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Also, I would assert that as possible that you maybe
care that the song was written by somebody.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
And part of this plugs is great.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Yeah, part of the plugs into what I'm calling the
effort phenomenon, which is just that we really care about
the effort that's gone into something. And so when we
look at Proust writing three thousand page novel and we
imagine the years or possibly decades.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
That it took him to do that.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
You know, I could generate a three thousand page thing
on chat GPT and you say, what a waste.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
I can't believe you'd actually want someone to read that.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah, So it's the it's our understanding of what he
did to get there that makes the difference. And by
the way, this is why I, for example, you know,
I give public lectures and I'm not at all worried
about that going away because people really care.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
I think, possibly now more than.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Ever, about seeing a human, you know, and having that
human fly across the country and stand on that stage
where I can see them.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
That makes a big difference. That's a great point. And
then of course the Q and A where you yeah,
you're not chat gptaying it. Yeah, it's real you, yeah,
real them. I love this point, and it can be
much more imperfect one of the abogies give this. I
gave this analogy on on an episode a while ago.
But there's this interesting thing with synthetic diamonds. Now, you
(44:01):
can in a laboratory generate a synthetic diamond that is perfect,
that has no flaws in it, but still people care
about the real thing with the flaws and won't pay
much more money for it because, in a sense, Mother
Nature put a billion years of effort into making that thing,
as opposed to five days in the lab. That's a
lovely analogy. I love that. I always think of Michelangelo's
(44:21):
Sistine Champel ceiling. I mean, it's intrinsically beautiful, but part
of what we're experiencing is how did he do that?
The virtue walcity is part of the experience. Yeah, how
did you do that? How did Michael Angelier pay the
Sisting Champel ceiling? How did Tony Morrison manage to pull
that incredible trick on us? And it's not just a
cheap trick. Yeah, it's a trick that moves us. It's
(44:44):
a trick that challenges us. It's a trick that makes
us relate to the world in a different way. It's
extraordinaring and you just have to take your hat off
to Tony Morrison, and that is an experience of a
human being that cannot be replicated through technology.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
That was my interview with my colleague at stand for,
Joshua Landy, as we talked about just a few of
the issues that surface in our course literature and the brain.
And so this brings me back to the beginning of
the podcast, to my kitchen where my daughter sits frozen,
her eyes darting around while her head is locked on
(45:22):
a page, and she is living in a world with
a monkey and a cat in outer space. Her body
is in the here and now, but her mind is elsewhere.
And that I think is the extraordinary magic of literature.
It takes the most advanced piece of biological hardware in
the known universe, the brain, and invites it to simulate
(45:47):
entire worlds, to run experiments in alternate lives, to dance
with ambiguity, and to revise its assumptions again and again.
What literature offers us isn't just entertainment. It's a rehearsal
space for empathy, for introspection, for humility. It teaches us
(46:08):
that our first instincts can be wrong, that people are
more complicated than they seem, that the world sometimes resists
tidy packaging, and the active reading becomes a kind of
cognitive calisthenics, one that exercises the mental muscles we need
in a complex, unpredictable society. We need curiosity and perspective taking,
(46:33):
and nuance and self doubt. So writers, most of whom
presumably had no training in neuroscience, have for millennia intuited
how to guide our attention, how to play on our biases,
how to surprise and disarm us, how to steer us
down garden paths, and how to leave us saying, oh,
(46:55):
my god, of course that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
These aren't just parlor tricks.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
These are acts of generosity, because what they offer us
is the chance to rewire ourselves to become slightly different,
slightly better versions of who we were before we picked
up the book. And that's why we might worry just
a little about the declining time that many people, especially
(47:21):
young people, are spending in the deep space of novels.
This is not because video games or tiktoks or youtubes
are inherently bad, but because they rarely offer the same
rigor of cognitive training. These short form things aren't generally
built to cultivate ambiguity or to stretch empathy across chapters
(47:45):
or lifetimes. Some might do it once in a while,
but novels specialize in it. So let's make sure we
don't lose the habit. Let's remember the strange human superpower
that we've developed to sit still, to decode squiggles on
a page, and to be emotionally transformed by people who
(48:05):
never existed. Let's honor the decades long effort that a
great author might spend to gift us with one transcendent moment.
And let's recognize that reading literature isn't passive consumption.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
It's active simulation. It's mental travel in time and space.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
It's the brain doing what it does best, building models
of the world, running them forward, learning, updating, and every
once in a while feeling awe. So the next time
use it down with a good novel, know this, you're
not wasting time. You're going to the cognitive gym to
(48:49):
become a stronger human. Go to Eagleman dot com slash
podcast for more and and to find further reading. Check
out my newsletter on substack and be a part of
the online chats there and you can watch videos of
Inner Cosmos on YouTube, or you can leave comments.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.