A Spoonful of Humor Makes the Puzzle Brain Turn On

22 Jun

Scientists have discovered that we humans are much better at solving puzzles if we are entertained or in a good mood:

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

“What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles.

(Full text: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/science/07brain.html)

So: what does this mean for narrative artists? Maybe it means we should leaven our leaden loaves of dirty laundry with a commedia routine.

My work with contemporary narrative artists in all fields leads me to conclude that we are commonly eschewing the most traditional plot: time and space moving forward as it does in real life toward a climactic moment. Today’s storytellers are often creating story arcs that ask an audience to put together the pieces of a fragmented or shattered narrative — something like a puzzle. And if the science is correct, is it perhaps suggesting we may have better luck persuading our audiences to track the puzzle — to integrate the pieces or shards into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts — if they are able to laugh while they do it, or least be in a positive mood for a moment before plunging back into the puzzle?

Science Proves We Go In Circles

17 May

The video below can be found at NPR.org, (3 min, 34 sec).

Humans innately go in circles when the horizon — the simplest form of context — is removed from our toolbox of perceptions. Is the circle a default protection mechanism? An adaptive trait that, as cavemen, saved us from disappearing into the wilderness when we inevitably got lost? And what implications does this have for narrative artists — how can we take advantage of it?

It seems to me that storytellers — playwrights, novelists, epic poets, etc — have intuitively known about this tendency for millennia. It is literally a trope employed in many stories: the characters, lost in the dark, walk in circles. But it is also used in the structure of narrative; many plots circle back to where they began, or execute an upward spiral (a form of circle, natch) that returns to where we began, but with new context. The good ol’ “rule of three” could be seen as a series of loops wherein the story returns to an idea a couple of times, each time adding something new. No doubt there are dozens of ways we could apply this understanding as narrative engineers persuading audiences to navigate our stories.

Article at HowlRound

1 May

My good friend and colleague Aaron Carter and I recently published an article at HowlRound.com, the Journal of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage. It is our goal to survey and contextualize new play development in North America and publish our findings (without editorial comment) so that theater practitioners can actually see what we are all doing — the various practices and methods — to help playwrights develop new work. The article is titled:

Zombies Limping in Circles, or An Argument for a Taxonomy of NPD Technique

To read it, visit the link below:

http://www.howlround.com/2011/05/01/zombies-limping-in-circles-or-an-argument-for-a-taxonomy-of-npd-technique-by-aaron-carter-and-erik-ramsey/

Mission: Tracking the Science of Narrative Technique

21 Apr

The goal of plotwrench.org is to track advances in the science of narrative technique in order to assist storytellers of all stripes in executing it. As the central communication device in all genres of storytelling, plot has developed over many hundreds (thousands?) of human generations; the basic system of plot in the western tradition has calcified into a remarkably stalwart backbone for diverse genres from plays and epic poems to films, long-form journalism, TV and even “funny or die” sketches. However, though toddlers seem to naturally (perhaps genetically?) become storytellers, authors at all levels often struggle to execute plot in a way that supports their artistic vision or comminicatory intent. At plotwrench.org, the mission is to bring the cutting edge laboratory findings of the sciences of human interaction (e.g. behavioral economics or evolutionary psychology) to bear as tools for better understanding why plot works, how it can be manipulated, and how it can best be executed in service to the vision of the author. To subscribe and receive an email when new posts are generated, use the “email subscription” widget at the bottom of the column on the right edge of this page.

Blog Under Construction

16 Apr

I have been accumulating science related to narrative technique in the form of journal articles, books, TED lectures and other resources for a couple of years now. This blog is intended to be a repository and revue of those materials for anyone interested in tracking research on how we understand our world through story, and new tools and techniques for taking advantage of advancements in our understanding of how plot structures affect the human brain. However, I am unable to really get rolling with posting materials until late June or July, 2011. Please check back then, or make use of the “subscribe by email” widget at the bottom of the column to the right to receive posts when they publish.

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