The Science of Storytelling. Will Storr
has struck. Frank and April have two children, with a third on the way, and have moved into a cookie-cutter suburb. Frank’s secured a job at his father’s old company and has found himself rather settling into a life of boozy lunches and housewife-at-home ease. But April isn’t happy. She still dreams of Paris. They argue, bitterly. Sex is withheld. Frank sleeps with a girl at work. And then he makes his theory-of-mind mistake.
In order to break the impasse with his wife, Frank decides to confess his infidelity. His theory of April’s mind appears to be that she’ll be thrown into a state of catharsis that will jolt her back into reality. There’ll be tears to mop up, sure, but those tears will just remind the ol’ gal why she loves him.
This is not what happens. When he confesses, April asks, Why? Not why he slept with the girl, but why is he bothering to tell her? She doesn’t care about his fling. This isn’t what Frank was expecting at all. He wants her to care! ‘I know you do,’ April tells him. ‘And I suppose I would, if I loved you; but you see I don’t. I don’t love you and I never really have and I never really figured it out until this week.’
As the eye darts about, building up its story world for you to live inside, the brain’s choosy about where it tells it to look. We’re attracted to change, of course, but also to other salient details. Scientists used to believe attention was drawn simply to objects that stood out, but recent research suggests we’re more likely to attend to that which we find meaningful. Unfortunately, it’s not yet known precisely what ‘meaningful’ means, in this context, but tests that tracked saccades found, for example, that an untidy shelf attracted more attention than a sun-splashed wall. For me, that untidy shelf hints of human change; of a life in detail; of trouble insinuating itself in a place designed for order. It’s no surprise test-brains were drawn to it. It’s story-stuff, whilst the sun is just a shrug.
Storytellers also choose carefully what meaningful details to show and when. In Revolutionary Road, just after Frank makes his changeful theory-of-mind mistake that throws his life in a new and unexpected direction, the author draws our attention to one brilliant detail. It’s an urgent voice on the radio: ‘And listen to this. Now, during the Fall Clearance, you’ll find Robert Hall’s entire stock of men’s walk shorts and sport jeans drastically reduced!’
Both believable and crushing, it serves to intensify our feelings, at exactly the right moment, of the suffocating and dreary housewifey corner that April has found herself backed into. Its timing also implicitly defines and condemns what Frank has become. He used to think he was bohemian – a thinker! – and now he’s just Bargain Shorts Man. This is an advert for him.
The director Stephen Spielberg is famous for his use of salient detail to create drama. In Jurassic Park, during a scene that builds to our first sighting of Tyrannosaurus rex, we see two cups of water on a car dashboard, deep rumbles from the ground sending rings over their liquid surface. We cut between the faces of the passengers, each slowly registering change. Then we see the rear-view mirror vibrating with the stomping of the beast. Extra details like this add even more tension by mimicking the way brains process peak moments of stress. When we realise our car is about to crash, say, the brain needs to temporarily increase its ability to control the world. Its processing power surges and we become aware of more features in our environment, which has the effect of making time seem to slow down. In exactly this way, storytellers stretch time, and thereby build suspense, by packing in extra saccadic moments and detail.
There’s a park bench, in my hometown, that I don’t like to walk past because it’s haunted by a breakup with my first love. I see ghosts on that bench that are invisible to anyone else except, perhaps, her. And I feel them too. Just as human worlds are haunted with minds and faces, they’re haunted with memories. We think of the act of ‘seeing’ as the simple detection of colour, movement and shape. But we see with our pasts.
That hallucinatory neural model of the world we live inside is made up of smaller, individual models – we have neural models of park benches, dinosaurs, Israel, ice cream, models of everything – and each of those is packed with associations from our own personal histories. We see both the thing itself and all that we associate with it. We feel it too. Everything our attention rests upon triggers a sensation, most of which are minutely subtle and experienced beneath the level of conscious awareness. These feelings flicker and die so rapidly that they precede conscious thought, and thereby influence it. All these feelings reduce to just two impulses: advance and withdraw. As you scan any scene, then, you’re in a storm of feeling; positive and negative sensations from the objects you see fall over you like fine drops of rain. This understanding is the beginning of creating a compelling and original character on the page. A character in fiction, like a character in life, inhabits their own unique hallucinated world in which everything they see and touch comes with its own unique personal meaning.
These worlds of feeling are a result of the way our brains encode the environment. The models we have of everything are stored in the form of neural networks. When our attention rests upon a glass of red wine, say, a large number of neurons in different parts of the brain are simultaneously activated. We don’t have a specific ‘glass of wine’ area that lights up, what we have are responses to ‘liquid’, ‘red’, ‘shiny surface’, ‘transparent surface’, and so on. When enough of these are triggered, the brain understands what’s in front of it and constructs the glass of wine for us to ‘see’.
But these neural activations aren’t limited to mere descriptions of appearance. When we detect the glass of wine, other associations also flash into being: bitter-sweet flavours; vineyards; grapes; French culture; dark marks on white carpets; your road-trip to the Barossa Valley; the last time you got drunk and made a fool of yourself; the first time you got drunk and made a fool of yourself; the breath of the woman who attacked you. These associations have powerful effects on our perception. Research shows that when we drink wine our beliefs about its quality and price change our actual experience of its taste. The way food is described has a similar effect.
It’s just such associative thinking that gives poetry its power. A successful poem plays on our associative networks as a harpist plays on strings. By the meticulous placing of a few simple words, they brush gently against deeply buried memories, emotions, joys and traumas, which are stored in the form of neural networks that light up as we read. In this way, poets ring out rich chords of meaning that resonate so profoundly we struggle to fully explain why they’re moving us so.
Alice Walker’s ‘Burial’ describes the poet bringing her child to the cemetery in Eatonton, Georgia, in which several generations of her family are interred. She describes her grandmother resting
undisturbed
beneath the Georgia sun,
above her the neatstepping hooves
of cattle
and graves that ‘drop open without warning’ and
cover themselves with wild ivy
blackberries. Bittersweet and sage.
No one knows why. No one asks.
When I read ‘Burial’ for the first time, the lines at the end of this stanza made little logical sense to me, and yet I immediately found them beautiful, memorable and sad:
Forgetful of geographic resolutions as birds
the far-flung young fly South to bury
the old dead.
It’s