“So it came to be that in the world’s earliest libraries, scripture and literature were joined. And indeed, so right was the jointure that literature and scripture would be fashioned with identical root meanings: “that which is writ.” They were two ways of saving the very same thing.”
“The first great power [of literature] was narrative, or, more colloquially, story. Story connected events.”
“The second great power of literature was the stirring of emotion: love, wonder, faith. For such was the strength of these feelings that they could fend off life’s mightiest demons.”
“A technology is any human-made thing that helps to solve a problem.”
“To be human is to be saddled with the problem of having a human brain. A brain capable of asking vast questions that it cannot answer.”
“By drawing on literature’s great power of story, these works answered existential doubts with narrative purpose.”
“[Literature] was a narrative-emotional technology that helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology. It was an invention for overcoming the doubt and the pain of just being us.”
Aristotle’s Poetics preserve invention-finding method consisting to two linked steps: what literature does, and how
Aristotle saw not just reason as “soul lifter” (per Plato) but wonder (thaumazein); achieved through plot twist
plot twist is final link in a chain that is straight but feels like a swerve
Buried in plot twist is the stretch: taking a regular story component (plot, character, setting) and extending it further (regular objects into metaphors, rhythms of speech into poetic meters, humans into heroes)
Described as self-transcendent experience or (per William James) spiritual
The stretch linked to decrease in parietal lobe activity (mental representations of self) causing “self-annihilation”; why we “lose ourselves” in stories
“By immersing our neural circuitry in the feeling of things bigger, they elevate our charity and our happiness, spiriting us closer to a scientific shangri-la.”
Catharsis via Greek tragedy important for purging fear; performances of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon including back-and-forth choreography mimicking benefits of EMDR
Poetics identifies importance of self-efficacy (inner conviction we can deal with fear) via anagnorisis: belated acknowledgement of trauma (aka Hurt Delay)
Audience’s foreknowledge of Oedipus’s tragedy stimulates sensation of cosmic irony in prefrontal cortex, giving God’s-eye perspective and ability to support — very therapeutic
“When we experience our ability to assist others through their trauma, we increase our belief in our ability to cope with trauma ourselves.”
Adapting our mind to literature and literature to our mind
Narrator is the mind behind a story, can inflect a story with tone (ring and timbre of the voice) and taste (preferred subject matter)
Translating tone/taste from oral to visual created style and focus of literary narrator
God Voice stretches truth into Truth, law into Law, etc
Amygdala releases adrenaline in fearful situations, but addition of oxytocin through “tend and befriend” survival strategy with others
Threefold chest heat of adrenaline, opioids, and oxytocin the “neurochemical elixir” and “heart flame that we hail as courage”
Paean (song to a god) combines a massed vocal chorus with holy supplication into courage-creating charge
The Iliad a massive paean “designed to stir the latest courage of our heart”
Scientific formula for love: self-disclosure combined with wonder (wonder becomes less necessary over time)
Sappho’s intensely personal poetry showed that lyric poetry “could be as mighty as epic, not by incorporating gods and other outside voices, but by revealing more of the I.”
Sappho also invented secret disclosure on behalf of someone else
Humans have biological desire for justice; better for long-term health and diversity of our communities
Empathy is the counterbalance to anger and bitterness of justice obsession; powered by newest neural circuitry of “perspective-taking” cortex
Empathy is good for mental health, but fickle enough to make us too softhearted; invention of apology helps neutralize negative emotions while honoring fairness
Literature’s “special power to carry us inside the minds of others” allows us to see true remorse and generate empathy even for villains
“No matter how stern your heart, there are characters in literature whose remorse will ring true. So you don’t just feel the primal zeal of righteousness. You feel the human touch of kindness too.”
Satire/irony generates detached vantage, which reduces felt intensity of emotional hurts—a mental novocaine (wry humor in soldiers, paramedics, etc)
Riddles activate wonder and information-seeking neurons
When we have some idea of an answer but are unconfident about it, dopamine hit and ravenous curiosity (“This is close-at-hand data that will change everything!”)
Curiosity crucial for our survival and happiness—generates positive affect
Medieval Catholic Church embraced allegory (Greek for “speaking other”) because it activated our brain’s spiritual zones and produced wonder; rituals and garments and architecture all meant something more
Familiar thing in unfamiliar place reminds of home, like home has stretched; unfamiliar thing in familiar place generates paranoia in threat-detection network of parietal lobe
Per Dante, churchmen used allegory to reveal hidden truth, poets to conceal it; intended The Inferno to trigger paranoia with pagan references within Christian narrative
“The Inferno hints at secret it never divulges because Dante believed that the secret was less important than the looking for the secret.”
Dante wrote: “My poem is an allegory about how we, through our own free choice, are punished or rewarded by Justice.”
Opposite of poetic justice is lucky twist (deus ex machina), which can generate optimism
Left-brain optimistic, right-brain pessimistic (not just realistic, which isn’t fully possible with our limited brains)
Fairy-tale Twist reminds us that we can be lucky, and have been; strengthens our resilience and gratitude
Hamlet an example of “Grief Releaser” plot (abandons usual forward momentum for drifting, aimless time of acknowledging grief) and “Guilt Lifter” character (someone else with shared frustration at formulaic condolences and desire to honor uniqueness of the departed)—together the Sorrow Resolver
Paradox as if we had two sets of eyes, of the body and of the mind; “the feeling of two truths in one”
Psychedelic: “the stretched-out experience of visual wonder that creates a special feeling in our brain”
“Our head is thus even more impossible than the philosophers and psychologists knew. Each waking instant is really instants twinned, making every second of our mental life a paradox.”
“The miracle of the impossible you. The one that glimpses two.”
Shame, guilt, and pride the “moral” emotions that reinforce ethical codes of community
“By imbuing us with a calm confidence in our own Way of being, it can make us less inclined to view alternate Ways as a threat, encouraging us to value other people for what makes them different.”
Deduction: using general knowledge to draw conclusions about individual cases; induction the reverse
John Herschel’s 1830 “Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy” married induction and deduction into “a method that established regeneration truths by testing predictions through trial”; the scientific method
Magical thinking, conformation bias, intellectual insecurity are the ego’s barriers to admitting failure
Transporting our brain to a new environment that isn’t associated with our health, social status, or material success can help ego adapt to failures
“Read widely in history, memoir, and autobiography, treasuring the uniqueness of every past life you discover while taking a lightly ironic view of your present self. That way, each dawn will bring a chance to celebrate history—and embrace future change.”
Gratitude has therapeutic potency over failure and misfortune by directing at others over self
Our brains by default accept things as true before retroactively tagging things as false
Repetition provokes deja vu and makes our brain self-conscious
Brain’s “default mode network” for anarchic streams of thought (mind wandering”) when brain not otherwise engaged
Soliloquy combines two different inner perspectives into a dialogic monologue; a verbal dramatization of a character’s inner conflict
Brain’s salience network monitors for internal conflicts to prompt resolution
Soliloquies help connect to Transcendentalism’s greater human soul
“Poetic phrasings release a brain-slowing burst of dopamine wonder that mingles out existing memories with a new mental perspective.”
“The longer we suspend our judgments, the more accurate our subsequent verdicts become.”
Pleasant museum triggers brain’s caudate nucleus to fire dopamine neurons into our nucleus accumbens, dosing is with neurochemical sweet that shares flavor with nicotine, heroin, and cocaine
Quintilian’s “Institutes of Oratory” laid out “three invention-making techniques, all borrowed from Nature, that our literary pens can imitate”:
- Embrace happy accidents. “Such accidents lie at the root of all of Nature’s inventions, engineered through evolution’s blind process of lucky mutation and fortuitous environment.”
- Splice together two old blueprints: Euripides’s tragicomedy, Shakespeare’s dialogic monologue.
- Focus on what works, not on what’s “right.” “This is how Nature has produced all of life’s intricate astonishments; natural selection knows no higher reason, only the wing that lifts and the brain that thinks.”
“Whatever the power of truth may be, literature’s own special power has always lain in fiction, that wonder we construct.”