Special to the Star
Robert Langdon, hero of Dan Brown's runaway 2003 bestseller The Da Vinci Code, may be a brilliant academic, but he often seems a bit dim. Throughout the novel, he gets so flustered that he remains in the dark about clues that were revealed to the reader many pages before, giving us a self-congratulatory tingle as we watch him bumble about. Langdon spends an entire chapter noodling about a murder site, distracted by marble statues and Caravaggios, before actually stumbling across the body that readers have known about since chapter one.
A technique to make readers feel smart, one might say. Maybe, or maybe it's all part of a larger scheme to keep them hooked.
Author Stephen King once described Brown's books as "the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese." Indeed, just as some people can't resist an onslaught of gooey, salty bits of Kraft Dinner, Brown's endless, unrelenting tease with small morsels of information maybe irresistible to the brains of his readers – something neuroscience can help us understand.
Brown's new novel, The Lost Symbol, which hits stores on Tuesday, is likely to duplicate the formula of The Da Vinci Code. In that book, even the smallest tidbits of information – whether a running description of the tiling inside the Louvre, a musing on the phallic nature of the Eiffel Tower or an essential clue to the murder plot – ooze gradually from the book's pages. Minute plot details are revealed in the same dramatic way as big twists – preceded by a suspenseful delay as characters ponder what could lie around the next corner. Pieces are meted out little by little, keeping us in a heightened state of salivating for more.
This kind of structure may be like chocolate cake for the brain, because it stimulates what's known in neuroscience as the "seeking" or "wanting" system, which is fuelled by the chemical dopamine. Dopamine is what makes humans and other mammals curious creatures, eager to investigate and probe new objects in order to find sources of food or sex. Intriguingly, mammals won't eat without dopamine – although they might love the taste of a piece of food, they won't take a bite if their wanting systems are shut off.
On the contrary, when researchers have given extra stimulation to the dopamine systems of rats or mice, through electrodes or genetic manipulation, the reaction is the opposite: "They'd run around like mice on cocaine, they'd pursue rewards very frantically," says Kent Berridge, a professor at the University of Michigan's affective neuroscience and biopsychology lab.
Dopamine turns out to be a key to drug addiction. But the chemical is also part of many other functions – it's even more important than the opioid system, which regulates pleasure. "Our daily lives are characterized by many more moments of desire than of pleasure," explains Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University and the granddaddy of research on the seeking system.
So, could dopamine explain why we get "addicted" to puzzles, games – and mystery novels?
No researcher has ever scanned a person's brain while they're reading a Dan Brown book to find out. But the evidence would seem to support the hypothesis.
"It's very plausible that the consumption of those little nuggets of information in the book and the puzzles, the cues, could stimulate the dopamine system," says Berridge. "Even a vivid image of this afterwards could stimulate it again and kind of trigger that appetite to go back to the book."
Being drawn along by small clues is a familiar – and appealing – sensation to dopamine-driven mammal brains. Indeed, to individual brains that are more primed for dopamine than others, mystery tales may be harder to resist.
This goes far to explain why we say that people "ruin" a book if they give away the ending.
Though it goes hand in hand with the seeking system, the opioid-driven pleasure system, or "liking" system, tends to allow the brain to rest in a contented flood of chemicals, a state where it no longer cares to "seek," or read, any further.
In fact, there is evidence that constant exposure to mysteries and clues – over the course of a book, for example – puts the brain in a state where it is more sensitized to dopamine. The more you read, the more you want.
But though Brown has this method of hooking readers by withholding information down to a formula, he didn't invent it. Detective authors from Agatha Christie to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the conceit to some extent. Edgar Allen Poe was an early master, drawing out intellectual debates between his detective, C. Auguste Dupin, and a dim-witted counterpart for many pages before revealing the key to the mystery. The phenomenon goes further than crime fiction. Charles Dickens' devoted fans waited eagerly to read weekly or monthly installments of his novels, many of which would end with tantalizing cliffhangers.
Does this mean that the moment where the puzzle is solved triggers our brain's pleasure system? Possibly.
"This would be a great cognitive neuroscience study for someone to do," says Berridge.
No comments:
Post a Comment