ERIN HART: FICTION = REALITY

DEBORAH CROMBIE: A new novel by Erin Hart is about as big

a treat as Christmas as far as I'm concerned. Set in Ireland, her books feature archeologists Nora Gavin and Cormac Macguire as they delve into mysteries as well as the past.

I'm not alone in my enthusiasm: According to a starred review in Publisher's Weekly, THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN, the fourth novel in the series, "Combines powerful insights into human nature and pristine prose...offers food for thought that persists beyond the immediate thrill of a well-told tale."  (Gorgeous cover, by the way.)

Not only does Erin Hart give readers eloquent language and deftly plotted mysteries, she creates characters that stay with us, and today she's going to share some very interesting theories about just why that is.

ERIN HART: I got a lovely, heartwarming message recently from a reader who was already missing Nora Gavin and Cormac Maguire when she finished reading THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN. That’s got to be one of the most satisfying moments for a writer, to hear that the people and places that have sprung from your imagination feel so real to other people as well.

I’ve long joked that some of my best friends are fictional characters. I was about eight when I wept for days over the death of poor Beth March after my mother read aloud from LITTLE WOMEN. I fell in love with the flawed and tragic Sydney Carton as I read A TALE OF TWO CITIES at age thirteen. Caught up in WAR AND PEACE at the cabin one summer, I remember telling my mother that I simply hadn’t the strength to wash dishes after supper—because I’d just lived through the Battle of Austerlitz. (Didn’t get away with that drama-queen excuse, as I recall, but heck—it was worth a try!)

Literature has always felt a bit more real to me than real life, and I don’t think I’m alone. I’m sure we all have certain characters who still linger in our consciousness, some for years after we’ve finished reading about them in a novel. The rational part of us knows that they’re made up, and yet…
 
Then, about a year ago, I read a wonderful article by Annie Murphy Paul in the New York Times. “Your Brain on Fiction” was about how sensory language stimulates the same areas of the brain as actual sensory or motor experiences. You can read the whole piece here.

Here are a few little excerpts from the piece that really stood out to me, as a writer and teacher of writing:

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not…

… the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.

Is this not just wildly fascinating? And at the same time, it’s only confirmation of what readers and storytellers have always known. Still, it’s stunning to have this concrete scientific evidence that words contain stronger magic than we realize. In our heads, we actually LIVE the stories our eyes take in from the printed page. In a way, reading fiction is a bit like dreaming, a state in which we sort through reality and possibility, where we can sift and sort and re-order and imagine, and try to make sense of things.

To me, one of the main points of reading fiction is to get inside the heads of others, to live vicariously through a diversity of characters. It’s amazing how easily we fall under the spell of a story, and feel a thread of connection to the characters, putting ourselves in their place, asking what we might do in the same situation. And it turns out that reading fiction actually does expand one’s sense of empathy and experience.

In her article, Annie Murphy Paul also cites some studies in which social skills are affected by what they read, which, again, is not at all surprising:

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.

It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television.

Since reading this piece, I’ve been asking people about the books and the characters that have stuck with them for years. So, how about it, readers? Tell us about some of the characters who have never left you, fictional creations who are so real that you still wonder about what they’re up to from time to time…

DEBS: Fascinating stuff! And I love that science is confirming what we readers have always known...

 Erin will be dropping in to answer questions and respond to comments, and she'll be giving away a copy of THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN to a very lucky commenter. You can learn more about Erin and her books at www.erinhart.com, on Facebook, on Twitter, and at her blog.