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 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 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 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 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.
My brain has overtrained on them so that.
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. 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. 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
was in the life of somebody else. Specifically, she was on a long trip through space with a cat and a monkey.
That's what her brain thought. At least for the most part.
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 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 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.
For years, josh.
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 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 the Brain, and that's proven to be a very popular class.
Happily people are in thanks to you. Yeah, thanks to you.
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.
It's been very fruitful.
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.
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 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. 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 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 the future, to predict things, to fill things in when they're not fully given to you, which we need in our daily lives.
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.
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.
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.
There you go. And the reason it works as a joke is.
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.
So we never expected that.
And this is the notion of the garden path, And so how do writers exploit this cognitive bias exactly right?
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 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 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.
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 the end they say, ha ha, it's actually this other thing that you totally miss because we led you down the garden path.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
And just to flesh out of this idea of selective attention, you know, let's let's take visual attention.
It's like a little spotlight and you.
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
his chest. So, and of course this is why it works with magic, because the magician does something.
You know, magicians do this thing.
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.
Attention goes to that.
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 as making sure that your attention is elsewhere.
Yeah, okay, good.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
But it makes me wonder what vocabulary they used among one another?
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?
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.
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.
I wonder how they described.
That when they, let's say, taught small seminar classes to other authors, how do they talk about it?
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 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 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 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
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
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 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 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 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. 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,
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? 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, he can't possibly be changed. Guess what we're wrong?
You know.
It strikes me this is part of the passage.
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.
But we have these.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Exactly because the novel is like a sandbox that you get to play in, and you get to follow these trajectories and say, oh.
Yeah, things can turn out.
I expect it, and yes, it strengthens our muscles for realizing that can happen in real life.
You know, I just posted on my substack this issue.
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.
By the way, there's a good.
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 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 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 for his whole career because of this, this one moment.
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,
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 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, 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.
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.
And the question is if we take that to its extreme.
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?
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, 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.
Including by the way, TikTok videos or Instagram or tweet them.
Yeah.
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.
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
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 particular things to.
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, 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 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 YouTube video one after the other after the other. There are things that we're losing if we lose that.
I agreed.
Are there any other cognitive biases that writers exploit?
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, 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 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 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 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
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
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.
So for other biases that writers can exploit, what about priming.
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 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 some surprising ways.
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.
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, 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.
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.
Word flashes and I mean just.
Exactly all the pathways that are tickled as a result of that exactly.
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 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. 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 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 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 of half expect the word s O n son.
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?
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
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
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, 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 had a feeling this is how it's going to work, sometimes just by trying it on themselves.
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.
Thought about these topics before. So here's the question I have for you.
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 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.
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 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.
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
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
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, 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 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 try to really lean into that and push that to its limit.
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 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.
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
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, 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 on in the transaction, But there are other cases where it clearly is absolutely essential.
Also, I would assert that as possible that you maybe care that the song was written by somebody.
And part of this plugs is great.
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.
That it took him to do that.
You know, I could generate a three thousand page thing on chat GPT and you say, what a waste.
I can't believe you'd actually want someone to read that.
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.
I think, possibly now more than.
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.
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 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
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 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.
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 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 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 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,
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, my god, of course that's what happened.
These aren't just parlor tricks.
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 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 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
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.
It's active simulation. It's mental travel in time and space.
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 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.
Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.