Cognitive Craft: How Four Writers Speak to Readers’ Senses

In this time of global crisis, people’s abilities to imagine matter more than ever. This project seeks to integrate the knowledge of fiction-writers, literary scholars, and natural scientists in order to understand how people of the digital and global age (the mid-1990s to the present) respond to written verbal cues with mental images that combine sensations in different modalities (such as vision and touch) so that the images feel like lived experiences.

No two human brains work identically, and the ways that people integrate tactile, motor, auditory, visual, olfactory, and gustatory information are only dimly understood. Research during the past two decades by neuroscientists such as Simon Lacey, Krish Sathian, and Charles Spence indicates that sensory integration occurs earlier in neural processing than originally thought, and that brain regions believed to “belong” to modalities such as vision might be better understood as specialized for functions such as navigation that require information from several modalities at once. Fiction-writers who draw on sensory memories to craft evocative language work with imagery that is already blended, and in readers, verbal cues also work “top-down,” addressing past sensory impressions that have long since been combined. Nevertheless, scientists who study the communications among human sensory and motor systems might benefit from the insights of fiction-writers who excel at creating multimodal sensory illusions. This project builds on the work of cognitive literary scholars such as Ellen Esrock, Elaine Scarry, G. Gabrielle Starr, Anežka Kuzmičová, and Elaine Auyoung, who have conducted path-breaking studies of creative writers’ strategies for helping diverse readers experience fictional worlds.

Because representations and understandings of sensory experiences vary with time and culture, this project focuses on four novels by contemporary English-language authors whose creative sensory descriptions are extraordinarily evocative:

• Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)
• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)
• Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins (2002)
• Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

These novels depict characters trying to survive violence in Haiti, the United States, India, Zimbabwe, and the Dominican Republic. These works have enjoyed popular as well as critical success partly because their authors describe their characters’ sensations so vividly. Danticat’s, Roy’s, Vera’s, and Díaz’s writing invites readers to simulate (mentally represent by reenacting and recombining their own relevant sensory experiences) what the characters may be feeling. Across fields, researchers will only understand how human sensory systems work if they consider everyone’s sensory experiences—including those of women and children in some of the world’s poorest regions. Finely crafted literature that encourages readers to share characters’ sensations can help researchers imagine inner lives under-represented in analytical fields.

The central questions of the project include:

1. In evocative descriptions, which sensory modalities are most often combined?
2. Which verbal references to sensations are likely to activate other senses, and why might this be?
3. How do combinations of characters’ sensations vary with their physical, social, and emotional circumstances?
4. Which sensory modalities are most often described directly, and which are most often characterized through metaphors?
5. How do descriptions of sensations vary with literary context, such as narrative exposition, dialogue, or chapter openings or conclusions?