Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (9 page)

HERE’S A WORD
you don’t come across much any more: spermatic. Not only does it feel archaic and arcane, as if it had been extracted from the nether regions of a mouldy physiology handbook, but it seems fatally tainted with political incorrectness. Only the rash or the drunken would dare launch the word into a conversation at a cocktail party. It wasn’t always such a pariah. In an essay published a century and a half ago the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson chose the adjective to describe the experience of reading: ‘I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was.’ For Emerson, the best books – the ‘true ones’ – ‘take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative’.
Books
are not only alive; they give life, or at least give it a new twist.

Emerson drew a distinction between his idea of reading and one expressed a few centuries earlier by Montaigne, who termed books ‘a languid pleasure’. Both men, it strikes me, had it right. Like Montaigne, I have spent many happy hours under the spell of books, enchanted by the beauty of the prose, the plot’s intrigue or the elegance of the argument. But there have also been times when, like Emerson, I have felt the transforming power of a book, when reading becomes a means not just of diversion or enlightenment, but of regeneration. One closes such a book a different person from the one who opened it. In his poem ‘Two Tramps in Mud Time’, Robert Frost, one of Emerson’s many heirs, wrote of the rare moments in life when ‘love and need are one, / And the work is play for mortal stakes’. That seems to me a perfect description of reading at its most vital and spermatic.

My life has been punctuated by books.
The Lord of the Rings
and
The Martian Chronicles
gave shape and heft to my boyhood, opening frontiers to wander in and marvel at far beyond my suburban surroundings. The tumult of my teenage years was fuelled by rock records, but
it
was put into perspective by books as various as Kerouac’s
On the Road
and Hemingway’s
In Our Time
, Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint
and Joseph Heller’s
Something Happened
. During my twenties a succession of thin volumes of verse – Frost’s
A Witness Tree
, Philip Larkin’s
Whitsun Weddings
, Seamus Heaney’s
North
– were the wedges I used to prise open new ways of seeing and feeling. The list goes on, decade after decade: Hardy’s
Return of the Native
, Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian
, Neil Sheehan’s
A Bright Shining Lie
, Denis Johnson’s
Jesus’ Son
and, recently, the wondrous voyage that is Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin series. Who would I be without those books? Someone else.

Psychologists and neurobiologists have begun studying what goes on in our minds as we read literature, and what they’re discovering lends scientific weight to Emerson’s observation. One of the trailblazers in this field is Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Toronto and the author of several novels, including the widely acclaimed
The Case of Emily V
. ‘For a long time,’ Oatley recently told the Canadian magazine
Quill & Quire
, ‘we’ve been talking about the benefits of reading with respect
to
vocabulary, literacy, and these such things. We’re now beginning to see that there’s a much broader impact.’ The source of this broader impact appears to lie in the complex effects that reading a work of literature, particularly narrative literature, has on the human brain. In his 2011 book
Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction
Oatley explains:

we don’t just respond to fiction (as might be implied by the idea of reader response), or receive it (as might be implied by reception studies), or appreciate it (as in art appreciation), or seek its correct interpretation (as seems sometimes to be suggested by the New Critics). We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, our own enactment.

Making sense of what transpires in a book’s unreal reality appears to depend on ‘making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly’.

One particularly intriguing study, conducted a few years ago by research psychologists at Washington University in St Louis, illuminates Oatley’s point. The scholars used brain scans to examine the cellular activity that occurs inside
people’s
heads as they read stories. They found, according to a report on the study, that ‘readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative’. The groups of nerve cells, or neurons, that are activated in the brains of readers ‘closely mirror those involved when [they] perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities’. When, for example, a character in a story puts a pencil down on a desk, the neurons that control muscle movements fire in a reader’s brain. When a character goes through a door to enter a room, electrical charges begin to flow through the areas in a reader’s brain that are involved in spatial representation and navigation. The actions and sensations portrayed in a story are, moreover, woven together ‘with personal knowledge from [each reader’s] past experiences’. Every reader of a book creates, in Oatley’s terms, his own dream of the work – and he inhabits that dream as if it were an actual place.

When we open a book, it seems that we really do enter, as far as our brains are concerned, a new world – one conjured not just out of the author’s words, but out of our own memories and desires – and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its rich emotional force. Psychologists draw a distinction between
two
kinds of emotions that can be inspired by a work of art. There are the ‘aesthetic emotions’ that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator: a sense of beauty or of wonder, for instance, or a feeling of awe at the artist’s craft or the work’s unity. These are the emotions that Montaigne likely had in mind when he spoke of the languid pleasure of reading. And then there are the ‘narrative emotions’ that we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates. These are the emotions Emerson may have had in mind when he described the spermatic, life-giving force of a ‘true book’.

Readers routinely speak of how books have changed them. A 1999 survey of people who read for pleasure found that nearly two-thirds of them believe they have been transformed in lasting ways by reading. This is no mere fancy. Experiencing strong emotions has been shown to cause alterations in brain functions, and that appears to hold true for the emotions we experience purely through reading. ‘The emotions evoked by literary fiction,’ reports Oatley in a 2010 paper written with psychologist Raymond
Mar
of York University in Toronto, ‘have an influence on our cognitive processing after the reading experience has ended.’ Although the extent of that influence has yet to be measured in a laboratory, it seems likely that the unusual length of time that we spend immersed in the world of a book would result in particularly strong emotional responses and, in turn, particularly strong cognitive changes. These effects would be further amplified, argues Oatley, by the remarkably ‘deep simulation of experience that accompanies our engagement with literary narratives’.

A recent experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities. The researchers recruited 166 university students and gave them a standard personality test that measures such traits as extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. One group of the participants read the Chekhov short story ‘The Lady with the Toy Dog,’ while a control group read a synopsis of the story’s events, stripped of its literary qualities. Both groups then took the personality test again. The results revealed that the people ‘who read the short story experienced significantly greater
change
in personality than the control group’, and the effect appeared to be tied to the strong emotional response that the story provoked. What was particularly interesting, Oatley says, is that the readers ‘all changed in somewhat different ways’. A book is rewritten in the mind of every reader, and the book rewrites each reader’s mind in a unique way, too.

What is it about literary reading that gives it such sway over how we think and feel and perhaps even who we are? Norman Holland, a former scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question. Although our emotional and intellectual responses to events in literature mirror, at a neuronal level, the responses that we would feel if we actually experienced those events, the mind we read with, argues Holland in his book
Literature and the Brain
, is a very different mind from the one we use to navigate the real world. In our day-to-day lives we are always trying to manipulate or otherwise act on our surroundings, whether it’s by turning a car’s steering wheel or frying an egg or clicking on a link at a website. But when we open a book our expectations and
our
attitudes change drastically. Because we understand that ‘we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions’, we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence are able to ‘disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions’. That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work. We read the author’s words with ‘poetic faith’, to borrow a phrase that the psychologically astute Coleridge used two centuries ago.

‘We gain a special trance-like state of mind in which we become unaware of our bodies and our environment,’ explains Holland. ‘We are “transported”.’ It is only when we leave behind the incessant busyness of our lives in society that we open ourselves to literature’s transformative emotional power. That doesn’t mean that reading is antisocial. The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations. Several studies have shown that reading tends to make us more empathetic, more alert to the inner lives of others. The reader withdraws in order to connect more deeply.

The scientific discoveries about book-reading’s
psychological
and cognitive effects won’t come as a surprise to any lover of literature. But even if the evidence serves mainly to confirm our common sense, it is nevertheless important. It arrives at a crucial moment in the history of literature, when more and more people are choosing to read books on computer screens rather than from pages. As this sudden and possibly epochal shift has gained momentum, a strangely distorted view of reading has gained some cultural currency. A group of Internet enthusiasts has taken to referring to the book, in its traditional form, as a ‘passive’ medium, lacking the ‘interactivity’ of websites, apps and video games. Because a page of paper can’t accommodate links, ‘Like’ buttons, search boxes, comment forms and all the other spurs to online activity that we’ve become accustomed to, the reasoning goes, the readers of books must be mere consumers of content, inert caricatures of Montaigne’s languid reader. A prominent publishing consultant, Jeff Jarvis, gave voice to this way of thinking in a post on his blog in 2006. Claiming that printed pages ‘create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader’, he concluded that, in the Internet era, ‘the book is an outdated means of communicating information’. He declared that ‘print is where words go to die’.

Anyone who would reduce a book to ‘a means of communicating information’, as if it were a canister for shuttling facts and figures among bureaucrats, is probably not the best guide to the possibilities of literary experience. But when foolish ideas move into the slipstream of technological progress, they can travel far – and cause considerable damage. Already the makers of e-reading devices, as well as the publishers of the books that go into them, are embracing the notion that books require a digital upgrade. Books ‘often live a vibrant life offline’, one Google executive has said, but they will be able to ‘live an even more exciting life online’. Although early versions of popular e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook did a pretty good job of replicating the tranquillity of a simple page of text, it now seems likely that the page’s calm, and the immersive reading it encourages, will be broken as a book’s words are made to compete for a reader’s attention with a welter of onscreen tools, messaging systems and other eye-catching diversions. The very form of a book seems fated to change as the written word shifts to a new means of production and distribution.

Not all books are literature, of course. Books of a purely practical nature – manuals, guides
and
certain types of textbooks, for instance – may well become more useful when their words are supplemented with an array of new features, from embedded videos and soundtracks to cut-and-paste buttons and comment threads. Unfortunately, when new features are added to consumer gadgets, they tend to be applied in a broad and often indiscriminate manner. The cutting edge cuts all ways. Penguin Books recently released, with great fanfare, what it calls an ‘amplified edition’ of
On the Road
, designed as a downloadable application for Apple’s iPad. ‘Tricked out with more fancy bells and whistles than a BMW M5’, as a
New York Times
reviewer put it, the book app comes with interactive maps, audio snippets, video clips, slideshows and a touchscreen interface. A simple tap on Kerouac’s words whisks the reader out of the story and into the digital marginalia. I’m sure I would have enjoyed playing with the
On the Road
app when I was a kid, but I doubt it would have rattled my soul in the way my tattered paperback did.

‘The house was quiet and the world was calm. / The reader became the book.’ So begins a haunting Wallace Stevens poem about the uncanniness of reading, published in the 1947
collection
Transport to Summer
. Norman Holland’s observation that the deepest kinds of reading require a dampening of our urge to act, a withdrawal from quotidian busyness, is really just a variation on Stevens’ theme. What both poet and scientist tell us is that Montaigne’s and Emerson’s views may actually be more in concert than in conflict. It may be that a reader has to enter a state of languid pleasure before he can experience the full spermatic vitality of a book. Far from being a sign of passivity, the reader’s outward repose sets the stage for the most profound kind of inner activity.