Of the novel “The Rosie Project,” by Graeme Simsion, Mr. Gates wrote: “I started it myself at 11 p.m. one Saturday and stayed up with it until 3 the next morning. Anyone who occasionally gets overly logical will identify with the hero, a genetics professor with Asperger’s syndrome who goes looking for a wife. (Melinda thought I would appreciate the parts where he’s a little too obsessed with optimizing his schedule. She was right.)”
Bibliotherapy: Can Reading Make You Happier?
In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.
.. Berthoud and Elderkin trace the method of bibliotherapy all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, “who inscribed above the entrance to a library in Thebes that this was a ‘healing place for the soul.’ ” The practice came into its own at the end of the nineteenth century, when Sigmund Freud began using literature during psychoanalysis sessions. After the First World War, traumatized soldiers returning home from the front were often prescribed a course of reading.
.. For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of “mirror neurons”—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer.
.. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.
.. This idea echoes a long-held belief among both writers and readers that books are the best kinds of friends; they give us a chance to rehearse for interactions with others in the world, without doing any lasting damage.
.. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm.
The Writer as Reader
An untold number of Americans will finish a book manuscript this year, and the mind-numbing majority of them will be confected by nonreaders. How can a nonreader imagine himself an author, the creator of an artifact that he himself admittedly would have no interest in? Can you fathom an architect who’s not fond of impressive buildings, or a violinist who has never listened to music?
.. Your sentences should be a constant source of disappointment and dread, a reminder of the regretful inadequacy of all language and how bloodily you must labor for emotional truth, intellectual assertion, and le mot juste. Joseph Epstein once wrote that “to be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment.”
Wired: Putting a Writer and Readers to a Test
Over the past two weeks, Mr. Grunberg has spent several hours a day writing his novella, while a battery of sensors and cameras tracked his brain waves, heart rate, galvanic skin response (an electrical measure of emotional arousal) and facial expressions. Next fall, when the book is published, some 50 ordinary people in the Netherlands will read it under similarly controlled circumstances, sensors and all.
Researchers will then crunch the data in the hope of finding patterns that may help illuminate links between the way art is created and enjoyed, and possibly the nature of creativity itself.
.. The current experiment, Mr. Grunberg said, emerged out of a desire to play with the darker possibilities of e-reader technology. If Amazon can track where Kindle users stop reading, he wondered, how else might an author be able to spy on his audience?
.. They have asked Mr. Grunberg to try to keep each chunk of text limited to one dominant emotion, and have tracked where his cursor was at various points in each writing session, to match his words with the physiological data.