Tag: fantasy fiction

The neuroscience of how you enter your fantasy-realms

If you grew up reading Harry Potter (or Lord of the Rings, as the case may be), chances are you’d have liked to move to the world of Hogwarts (or Middle Earth), and spent time play-acting scenes in your head as if you were in them. This way of enjoying fiction isn’t uncommon. On the contrary, the potentially intimidating levels of detail that works of fantasy offer often lets us move in with the characters we enjoy reading about. As a result, these books have a not inconsiderable influence on our personal development. It isn’t for nothing that story-telling is a large part of most, if not all, cultures.

That being the case, it was only a matter of time before someone took a probe to our brains and tried to understand what really was going as we read a great book. Those someones are Annabel Nijhof and Roel Willems, both neuroscientists affiliated with the Radboud University in The Netherlands. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technique that employs a scanner to identify the brain’s activity by measuring blood flow around it, “to investigate how individuals differently employ neural networks important for understanding others’ beliefs and intentions, and for sensori-motor simulation while listening to excerpts from literary novels”.

If you’re interested in their methods, their paper published in PLOS One on February 11 discusses them in detail. And as much as I’d like to lay them out here, I’m also in a hurry to move on to the findings.

Nijhof and Willems found that there were two major modes in which listeners’ brains reacted to the prompts, summed up as mentalizing and activating. A mentalizing listener focused on the “thoughts and beliefs” depicted in the prompt while an activating listener paid more attention to descriptions of actions and replaying them in his/her head. And while some listeners did both, the scientists found that the majority either predominantly mentalized or predominantly activated.

This study references another from 2012 that describes how the neural system associated with mentalizing kicks in when people are asked to understand motivations, and that associated with activating kicks in when they’re asked to understand actions. So an extrapolation of results between both studies yields a way for neuroscientists to better understand the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with assimilating stories, especially fiction.

At this point, a caveat from the paper is pertinent:

It should be noted that the correlation we observed between Mentalizing and Action networks, only holds for one of the Mentalizing regions, namely the anterior medial prefrontal cortex. It is tempting to conclude that this region plays a privileged role during fiction comprehension, in comparison to the other parts of the mentalizing network

… while of course this isn’t the case, so more investigation – as well as further review of extant literature – is necessary.

The age-range of participants in the Nijhof-Willems study was 18-27 years, with an average age of 22.2 years. Consequent prompt: a similar study but with children as subjects could be useful in determining how a younger brain assimilates stories, and checking if there exist any predilections toward mentalizing or activating – or both or altogether something else – which then change as the kids grow up. (I must add that such a study would be especially useful to me because I recently joined a start-up that produces supplementary science-learning content for 10-15-year-olds in India.)

So… are you a mentalizing reader or an activating reader?

Lord of the Rings Day

Today is Lord of the Rings Day. On this day, in the year 3019 of the Third Age, Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee reach the Sammath Naur and cast the One Ring into Orodruin, in whose fires the ring was first forged. Thus, the ring is destroyed and leads to the downfall of Sauron, the Dark Lord. However, this doesn’t mark the end of the War of the Ring (although it does in the movies) – that happens when Saruman is defeated in the Battle of Bywater by the hobbits on November 3 of the same year.

Why do I still remember the date? I don’t know. Tolkien’s books were good, three of the best, in fact, and much better than the trope to come after. There were a few notable exceptions, but nothing has came to being just as original until, I’d say, GRRM and Erikson. I was briefly excited by Robert Jordan but his more classical narrative combined with a droning style bored me. It was never the length because one of my enduring favourites is Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which has seen 10 books and one part of a trilogy already out (all kickass – you should check them out).

Nevertheless, reading Lord of the Rings in 2003 was an important part of my life. In the years since, I have taken away different morals from the book – which, thankfully, aren’t as mundane as Jordan’s nor as multi-hued as Erikson’s (or as gruesome as Martin’s or as juvenile as Feist’s). Beyond the immediate take-away that is good-versus-evil, there are tales of friendships, sacrifices, trust, humility and leadership. And what a great epic all of it made! As it happens, Lord of the Rings Day is actually Tolkien Reading Day. So if you haven’t already read the trilogy, or its adorable prequel The Hobbit (or Silmarillion, for that matter), grab a copy and start. It’s never too late.

In the Valley of Drums…

For lack of a more sensational beginning: Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy fiction series is the best piece of writing I have ever encountered. Erikson’s experience as a archaeologist and an anthropologist is brought to bear in every line of the 10-book epic, producing a tale that is vigorously gripping yet mercilessly sophisticated. But once you are those requisite 30 to 40 pages in, you will come to understand why such sophistication is important, rather can be, because you will suddenly be aware of how much other works of fantasy fiction have chosen to leave out. Many readers of the series have criticized him for making his narrative so complex, so “unreasonably” intricate, but I find it tremendously gratifying that when I read his work, I feel as if I am drawn closer to the helplessness that Erikson himself feels… a kinship founded on knowing how much can go left unsaid for every plot concluded.

Right now, I’m re-reading the Malazan series for, I think, the third time. During each iteration, there has been room for profound discovery. In the seventh book, Reaper’s Gale, consider the example of a valley described by Erikson where two armies are due to meet. One army, that of the Letherii, employs sorcerers of considerable power, while the other, the tribal Awl, are reliant solely on the edges of iron. The valley, called Bast Fulmar – “Valley of Drums” – was chosen by the Awl warleader for the clash because it has been sapped of its ability to support magic. And how did it lose its magic? Here is how the Awl warleader, the enigmatic Redmask, describes it.

When the world was young, these plains surrounding us were higher, closer to the sky. The earth was a thin hide, covering thick flesh that was nothing but frozen wood and leaves.The rotted corpse of ancient forests. Beneath summer sun, unseen rivers flowed through that forest, between every twig, every crushed-down branch. And with each summer, the sun’s heat was greater, the season longer, and the rivers flowed, draining the vast buried forest. And so the plans descended, settled as the dried out forest crumbled to dust, and with the rains more water would sink down, sweeping away that dust, southward, northward, eastward, westward, following valleys rising to join streams. All directions, ever flowing away.

The land left the sky. The land settled onto stone, the very bone of the world. In this manner, the land changed to echo the cursed sorceries of the Shamans of the Antlers, the ones who kneel among boulders.

Such a piquant evocation of the living world we occupy I have not read elsewhere. Redmask, then, goes on to describe what went wrong with the world, with a valley in particular, to leave it so ghastly and raw (in context).

Bast Fulmar, the Valley of Drums. The Letherii believe we hold it in great awe. They believe this valley was the site of an ancient war between the Awl and the K’Chain Che’Malle – although the Letherii know not the true name of our ancient enemy. Perhaps indeed there were skirmishes, such that memory survives, only to twist and bind anew in false shapes. Many of you hold to those new shapes, believing them true. An ancient battle. One we won. One we lost – there are elders who are bold with the latter secret, as if defeat was a knife hidden in their heart-hand.

Bast Fulmar. Valley of Drums. Here, then, is its secret truth. The Shamans of the Antlers drummed the hide of this valley before us. Until all life was stolen, all waters fled. They drank deep, until nothing was left. For at this time, the shamans were not alone, not for that fell ritual. No, others of their kind had joined them – on distant continents, hundreds, thousands of leagues away, each and all on that one night. To sever their life from the earth, to sever this earth from its own life.

Bast Fulmar. We rise now to make war. In the Valley of Drums, my warriors, Letherii sorcery will fail. Edur sorcery will fail. In Bast Fulmar, there is no water of magic from which to steal. All used up, all taken to quench the fire that is life. Our enemy is not aware. They will find the truth this day. Too late. Today, my warriors, shall be iron against iron. That and nothing more.

Bast Fulmar sings this day. It sings: there is no magic. There is no magic!

There is of course an obvious reality mirroring this scene, an allusion to how we are draining this world, severing it from its own life.

Ah, Bast Fulmar…

Crowd-sourcing a fantasy fiction tale

What if thousands of writers, economists, philosophers, scientists, teachers, industrialists and other many other people from other professions besides were able to pool their intellectual and creative resources to script one epic fantasy-fiction story?

Such an idea would probably form the crux of an average to poor book idea, but the story itself would be awesome, methinks.

Here’s an example. Every great writer, most notably Asimov, whose works of sci-fi/fantasy I’ve read has speculated upon the rapidly changing nature of different professions in their works.

The simplest example manifests in Asimov’s 1957 short story Profession. In the story, children are educated no longer within classrooms but almost instantaneously through a brain-computer interface, a process called taping.

Where are the teachers in this world? They, it seems, would come later, in the guise of professionals who compose and compile those information-heavy tapes. Seeing as Profession is set in the 66th century of human civilization, the taping scenario is entirely plausible. We could get there.

But this is one man’s way of constructing a possible future among infinite others. Upon closer scrutiny, many inconsistencies between Asimov’s world and ours could be chalked up. For one, the author could have presupposed events in our future which might never really happen.

However, such scrutiny would be meaningless because that is not the purpose of Asimov’s work. He writes to amaze, to draw parallels – not necessarily contiguous ones – between our world and a one in the future.

But what if Asimov had been an economist instead of a biochemist? Would he have written his stories any differently?

My (foolish) idea is to just draw up a very general template of a future world, to assign different parts of that template to experts from different professions, and then see how they think their professions would have changed. More than amaze, such a world might enlighten us… and I think it ought to be fascinating for just that reason.

The cloak of fantasy, the necessity of stories to engage all those professions and their intricate gives-and-takes and weave them into a empathetic narrative could then be the work of writers and other such creatively inclined people or, as I like to call them, ‘imagineers’.

This idea has persisted for a long time. It was stoked when I first encountered in my college days the MMORPG called World of Warcraft. In it, many players from across the world come together and play a game set in the fictitious realm called Azeroth, designed by Blizzard, Inc.

However, the game has already been drawn up to its fullest, so to speak. For example, there are objectives for players to attain by playing a certain character. If the character fails, he simply tries again. For the game to progress, the objectives must be attained. That’s what makes a game by definition, anyway.

 

My idea wouldn’t be a game because there are no objectives. My idea would be a game to define those objectives, and in a much more inclusive way. Imagine an alternate universe for all of us to share in. The story goes where our all-encompassing mind would take us.

The downside, of course, would be the loss of absolute flexibility, with so many clashing ideas and, more powerful, egos. But… play it.