When psychologist and author Keith Oatley writes his next novel, he can make sure that each description of a scene includes three key elements – to better help the reader create a vivid mental image. Not one element; that would be forgettable. Not six elements; that might be boring.
He could have learned this from Anton Chekhov, master of the short story. Oatley, a great admirer of the Russian writer, recalls one Chekhov story that includes a description of a pond under snow. With a factory. Across from a village.
In fact, Oatley learned the lesson from a study that used MRI scans to show brain activity in readers: The area of the brain used to create a mental image was best activated when descriptive passages used three elements.
Oatley, professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, is also the author of three novels, including The Case of Emily V. which won the Commonwealth Prize in 1994, but his most recent work combines the two fields. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction is part of a growing movement to find hard evidence for a soft pursuit, looking to various sciences to explain the power of fiction. Contrary to the notion that art merely copies life, Oatley's argument is that a movie, play, story, poem or novel creates a mental model in which readers can try out ideas about themselves and others.
“If you say fiction to anybody, they immediately say ‘Oh, something that has been made up.' … What you really want to know is what is the subject matter of fiction,” he said. “The subject matter of fiction is what people are up to with each other and within themselves, what it is to be a self, interacting with others in the social world. … If you want to read about genetics you read [Richard] Dawkins or someone, and you get good at understanding genetics. If you read fiction, what you get good at understanding is what goes on between people.”
Oatley and his several colleagues are actually trying to measure that knowledge. In one study, they used a test in which subjects are asked to choose the emotion expressed in a photograph of a person's eyes, a measure of empathy developed by the British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, who studies autism. Fiction readers scored higher, even when the psychologists subtracted out influences that might suggest the more empathetic people would tend to read more fiction.
To further test that empathy is a product of reading fiction rather than the reverse, York University psychologist Raymond Mar experimented with two groups of randomly selected subjects, one of which read a short story and the other a piece of non-fiction. He then subjected them to a test of social reasoning and found the short-story group performed better.
Oatley would like to repeat such a study with a much larger group over a longer time period, perhaps signing up subjects who would agree to read only fiction or non-fiction for a year.
In another study, Oatley's UofT colleague Maja Djikic rewrote the Chekhov short story The Lady with the Little Dog as a piece of non-fiction, as though this story of an illicit love affair were the transcript of a trial. When asked to perform standard personality tests, subjects who had read the real thing instead of her rewrite showed more signs of shifts in character traits. And the more emotions they reported feeling during their reading, the more they changed. There was no particular direction to these shifts in personality: If propaganda, rhetoric or marketing aims to push the reader one way, fiction simply opens up the possibility of movement.
“It is not that one puts bread into a toaster and it makes toast,” Oatley said. “It is an opportunity for the reader or the movie watcher to change. It's not a straight causal effect.”
