Scanning for the Imagination

Posted By: Adrian Slatcher, 24 June 2010

If the imagination is boundless, then having Maria (M.J.) Hyland (pictured) talk to us about neuroplasticity to kick off this second session of the Writers’ Salon, thinking about the reader in relation to the education of the imagination, was entirely appropriate.
    
Our writers’ neurons kicked in immediately, both because it’s a subject that many of us knew little about, and also because thinking about the brain sees science stepping into a writers’ territory.
    
Neuroplasticity refers to how the brain adapts and changes – and how particular parts of the brain do not necessarily do specific tasks independently. The brain is not only bigger than the sum of it’s parts but changes according to the environment. In laboratory tests, rats who are placed in “enriched environments” have more branches to their brain and stronger brains than those who don’t.

But in the latest experiments in neuroscience, it is humans who are the lab rats. Hyland gave the example of an experiment where three different groups are given direct instructions: to learn to play a piano, to simply stare at a piano and to imagine playing the piano. Scans showed that the group who imagined playing the piano had the same “lighting up” of parts of the brain as the first group, who’d actually learned to play it.
    
She talked about a whole series of other experiments that are being attempted by neuroscientists – such as Susan Greenfield and Colin Blakemore - who are beginning to increase science’s knowledge of how the brain functions. Hyland gives her own idea for an experiment that she’d like to see take place. What happens to writer brains when they write? What happens when we imagine?
    
In responding to Hyland’s provocation, the rest of the group had a number of observations and questions, including wanting to probe more into the detail of these experiments. For instance, several people had seen the video of two schoolgirls playing, interpolated with a gorilla, which people failed to notice because they had been conditioned not to see it. The writer, who is meant to see things, will inevitably wonder whether this is just an optical illusion or a more profound insight into how we perceive.
    
But though we were clearly stimulated by these scientific advances in understanding the brain, there was also some scepticism. How, for instance, can a person simply “stare” at a piano for five days without imagining?

It was mentioned that a number of successful novels over the last few years could almost be called “neuronovels,” imagining characters who are either damaged or have a different way of looking at the world, like the boy with Aspergers syndrome in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time or the character who has Huntington Syndrome in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Yet if these books are exploring characters through conditions that are only recently being defined by the medical community, are they not in some way “pathologising” what it is to be human?

Through history, writers have always created characters in the midst of some kind of psychic extremis, pre-empting scientific enquiry into the mind by years or decades. It’s no real surprise that Henry James could be said to have written “neuronovels”, when correspondence with his psychiatrist brother William James could provide the psychological underpinning for the nuanced characters of his later novels. It is the minute movements of the consciousness that you see in James’ novels which show a keen understanding of how our minds and emotions work. Proust, as well, is known to have read the notes of his doctor father.

If neurological science is now of such interest to novelists, it is nothing new, because novelists have been writing about these issues for a century or more. In this context, you could conceive of writers as creators of “enhanced environments” which do, indeed, “light up” the brain. Yet we were reminded that writing is not always about the novel. In films, plays and television, writers are working in a collaborative medium, where the finished work – with the various contributions of director, actors, and technicians – is not the result of an individual consciousness but of some kind of shared “social imagination.” In video games – once derided for their formulaic nature – new studies are showing that playing them does not “dumb down” the subject but can be stimulating instead. Games are no longer repetitive addictions like “Space Invaders” but complex multi-faceted environments and writers are increasingly involved as participants in creating the game experience, that can then be handed over to the participant, who has some power over the game’s imaginative content.

Yet although much of this is self-evident, I wondered whether we should also be asking a question about the importance of having a good teacher – for whether it’s playing a game or reading a novel, our ability as participants or readers to get the most out of it (to have an “imaginative experience”) is determined partly by how confident we are in our abilities. A poverty of experience may lead to a poverty of imagination, whether a human “lab rat” asked to stare at a piano, or a political prisoner incarcerated in solitary confinement without reading or writing materials.

If we are talking about the “education of the imagination” perhaps we have to be careful that we don’t come too easily to a consensus about what that phrase means, as our imaginations may well be constructions of our history and environment. For all the advances in neuroscience, science’s methods and results can seem a little crude, through the visualising the electrical changes in the brain following different activities, and then interpreting what that means. If the brain responds to an “enhanced environment” and an imaginative work is a good example of that environment, would there be a difference between a good novel and a bad one? We know, or think we know, that great literature is a stimulant for the mind – and perhaps don’t need the crude nomenclature of science – “lighting up,” “active brains” – to describe what we, as writers, already show some understanding of.

There seemed, half way through the discussion, to be a little bit of a split between those who approached writing rationally, and those who approached it imaginatively. Perhaps as creative practitioners, we need to make the case for the latter, regardless of how we get there, rather than conceding the argument to the rationalists and trying to deliver a case for the imagination in an inferior language.

For our second provocation, Nick Jose (pictured) asked us how literature travels across borders. In a sharp, short opening, he asked that we remember Randolph Stow, an Australian writer of visionary novels, who returned to his ancestral homelands in Suffolk in the late 60s, and who died earlier this year. Stow’s reverse pilgrimage has traduced, for now, his reputation in Australia, but Jose used it as an example of how a writer’s works move through time and space, and “seldom in a straight line.”

He spoke about China and the difficulties that country sees in matching its economic hegemony with a cultural one. If we – or they – are looking for a worldwide literature we see it in the rows of Agatha Christie novels in a bookshop in Shanghai. Agatha Christie – and other crime writers – are clearly “world” authors, whatever we might think of their literary merit. Like video games, detective fiction entertains us within certain comfortable parameters, and perhaps, limits rather than develops our imaginative reach.

I hadn’t realised, until Jose mentioned it, that the story of Aladdin is an “orphan” tale. Though seen as one of the key stories of the Arabian Nights, and translated and adapted many times, the earliest version we know of was when a French writer wrote it down after being told it by an anonymous Syrian traveller. Like Beowulf, another orphan text, it seems to be a significant story from our literary pre-history, yet only relatively recently was it assimilated into that history.

The way in which literature travels across borders and time has many different aspects – from what is translated (and this is often dictated by the market), to what is expected (a Western expectation of what Chinese literature is). We were reminded of how American literature took a long time to find it’s own voice, with writers before Twain and Melville echoing or incorporating the tropes of English literature. The importance of an “imagined” literature for America comes from America’s history – where the very idea of America predated it’s existence, and perhaps remains to this day. For South African literature, the imagination may be disabled by certain expectations of what makes a South African novel – yet surely, during apartheid, the state’s dysfunctional role was to propagate that disability. In the third and final session of the salon, we hope to come back to this particular point.
    
The writer and the writer’s imagination cannot be entirely circumscribed whatever the limits of the country (or culture) in which they operate. Their imagination remains singular. We think back to our first day’s discussion and to our discomfort at the writer’s role within an institution. Where the reader (or “the market”) has certain expectations, it is perhaps inevitable that some writers will follow, either out of necessity, or because it fits with their own world view, yet these parameters may only be ones that we work within. Publishers, governments, even readers may have some sense that writing should be “authentic” first, and “imaginative” second. The group seemed unhappy at the concept of “authenticity” to define literature’s value, for it may be used as an excuse to disable the imaginative response to a particular question. Although we attended the salons in between the various readings during this week, those readings seem vital to this discussion in many ways. An “evening of South African writers” or an “evening of Australian writers” doesn’t give us a school, or even a representative set of voices. Rather it foregrounds the individuality of a writer’s own voice ot even of a particular piece of work within that writer’s oeuvre.

Returning to Hyland’s initial thoughts  on neuroplasticity, it seems to me that creative writing is Exhibit A in any case for the imagination. Each text that we write or read is not just some kind of switch that “lights up” a particular part of the brain, but something that creates a more subtle interchange with the way that we think. We may look to define the imagination to appease a rationalist view of the world, but in doing so, we are not conceding the argument, so much as indulging it. Writers, fascinated as ever by the world that we both live in and attempt to describe, are always willing to adapt to a changing world. The imagination, it seems, is always more than the sum of its parts.