What can neuroscience tell us about novels, poems, and plays? Can fiction help us develop real-world cognitive skills? And can writers exploit our mental weaknesses—for our own good? These are some of the questions we'll be asking on this week’s show, “Your Brain on Literature.”

I think readers and writers of literature have a lot to learn from today’s sciences of mind. And this week’s guest, neuroscientistDavid Eagleman, does too. David and I recently taught a class together called “Literature and the Brain,” and we looked at all kinds of fascinating ideas coming from the world of neuroscience and empirical psychology.

There are so many wonderful results and insights to discuss. For example, there’sLisa Zunshine’s brilliant theorythat reading novels can make us better at tracking social information and at inferring other people’s mental states from their behavior. And then there’s a set of cognitive biases—that is, standard kinds of mistakes the human brain makes—that novelists, poets, playwrights, and screenwriters can exploit, just as stage magicians exploit our selective attention to pull off their tricks. To put it as a slogan, “cognitive biases are a writer’s best friend!”

These biases of ours allow works of literature tosurprise us, to delight us, to tickle our funny-bones (via “garden path” effects), to guide our experience (via “priming”), and to keep us engaged. Engaged long enough, if Zunshine and others are right, to do us some pretty important cognitive favors.

But cognitive biases can also be thetargetof literary works. Consider this coolfinding: readers from one social group are more likely to empathize with a character from another social group if the identity of that character is revealed relatively late in the story. (Toni Morrison did this in some of her fiction, and explained why she did so in awonderful essay.) In cases like that, a reader might start with a harmful bias and end up, all being well, with that bias being reduced or even removed.

这还不包括那些直接受到神经科学发展启发的小说、诗歌、戏剧和电影。Think, for example, of the novels we’ve seen recently that explore various kinds of mind—likeThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Timefor the autism spectrum,Motherless Brooklynfor Tourette’s,Freshwaterfor Dissociative Identity Disorder,The Echo Makerfor capgras, andIan McEwan’sSaturday(my favorite so far) for Huntington’s—or other developments in psychology, like Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (film version:Arrival), which draws brilliantly on the work of Lera Boroditsky and others.

当然，现在你可能会担心，科学有一种过度概括的危险倾向。An importantrecent book by Joseph Henrich他风趣地指出，许多心理学实验的测试对象都是“W.E.I.R.D.”也就是说，他们来自西方的、受过教育的、工业化的、富裕的和民主的社会，比如美国。That’s a fair critique—but many of the most interesting experimental results talk precisely about thedifferencesamong communities.Lera Boroditsky例如，该研究向我们展示了民族语言(英语、西班世界杯赛程2022赛程表欧洲区牙语、普通话、阿拉伯语……)如何对我们的思维方式产生潜移默化的影响。在这种情况下，你用什么语言读一本书真的很重要。也许用第二种语言读诗甚至可以培养一种以新的方式看世界的能力。

Today’s psychologists are interested in other differences, too: not just differences at the broad level of linguistic areas but local differences, the kind you might even see between two siblings in the same family. Here’s one: what do you visualize when you read a novel? That probably depends on the novel and on your mode of reading (screen, paper, or audiobook? skimming or deep-diving? reading for fun or for class?). But it also depends on what kind of visualizer you are. Some people “see” individual objects in great detail; others are likely to picture configurations in space; and others still don’t see images at all. What doyou当你阅读时看到?

Maybe we’ll find out what our guest David Eagleman sees when we talk to him this week. Tune in for what will be a great discussion!