I recently stumbled upon this New York Times article by Annie Murphy Paul, in which she talks about the importance fiction has on one’s brain. In several studies mentioned throughout the article, it is proven that fiction, the ability to remove ourselves from reality and place ourselves within another life, gives us more skills than just having the ability to read. One study shows that reading sensory words affects our brain the same way that actually having an interaction with those words would. Another study suggests that reading about an action affects the brain the same way that actually performing an action would. I have to say, these studies and this article have me wondering: are we focusing too much on actual technology and forgetting about the technology we all already possess?
I’ve always been insanely fascinated by the way the brain and the human body work. I have also always been enamored with fiction. I love the way that authors have the ability to make their readers feel out-of-body. Something about being able to be someone else, to be able to live their lives and have their friends, or to be able to be there for them and feel what they’re feeling gives a reader the ability to be anything they want to be. But I feel like that comes with the ability to turn a page, to smell the crisp pages of a new book, and to feel the print on the paper. There’s something too artificial about reading from an e-reader, in my opinion, and because of that, I think that people aren’t getting the satisfaction of fiction and reading that they used to.
Along with that, since reading this article, I’ve given a lot of thought to where education stands in this whole dilemma. And I believe that education stands in the way of a student being able to feel the emotions that they should when reading. Teachers and professors force their students to read and think how they want them to about a book that they’re reading and because of that, students aren’t able to fully experience a story. Along with that, at least in my experience, teachers often show the movie version of the book at hand either while or after reading a novel. I hate when teachers do this. Not only are the students shown how the characters are expected to look and how the actions are expected to take place, the film versions are often very skewed versions of the stories. It takes away from what our brains give us creatively regarding the story.
This article gives us wonderful insight into how the technology of our brains is often looked past and brushed under the rug due to tangible technology taking over. There comes a point in our lives where we either have to stand with technology or stand against technology. In many cases, I stand with technology, but when it comes to the magic of books and reading, I whole-heartedly stand against technology.
Hi Shelby,
ReplyDeleteYou are not alone in your amazement over the ability our brains have to get lost in a work of fiction! I rarely watch movies made from my favorite novels, and I never watch music videos of my favorite songs. This is a choice I made years ago because movies and videos only give us ONE person's interpretation of a piece of fiction (some songs are fictitious, too) and their imagination never matches up to my own. So I'm thinking that rather than show the movie versions of books to students, teachers should encourage the students to bring the fictional characters to life on their own, which could be creating their own mini-video or comic book. It would be fascinating to see how everyone interpreted the characters differently, and to highlight that our imaginations and brains are totally unique to each of us. As an art teacher, I would totally be on board to do an interdisciplinary lesson of this sort with an English teacher! So maybe the dilemma is to use the overlooked technology in our brain in conjunction with the manual and electronic technologies we also take for granted.
Laura, you're brilliant. To have an English class work with an art class and have the art class help bring the visions of the characters that the English students have is such a great idea! I think, in some ways, that showing movie versions of books to students is sometimes a cop-out; that teachers use it as a lesson replacer. I think that you are really on to something with the collaboration of brain technologies within a school.
ReplyDeleteShelby,
ReplyDeleteYour article choice was phenomenal! I agree completely that fiction can provide the escape from reality we all long for and sometimes secretly wish were true (oh.. it's just me, ok never mind). I feel that technology helps to add to the fiction genre but also hurts it at the same time. For example, I am an avid reader and will always read the book before a movie comes out based upon a novel. I cannot say the same for many kids of today's generation. They would rather see the movie a hundred times over, even if it is abysmal, than simply sit down and read the novel for the nuggets of gold that lie within it. I hope to change that when I become a teacher but I feel that the movement for fiction in its original format as opposed to TV dramas, movies, etc is slowly becoming less receptive to the mass audience. Laura's ideas for lesson plans are awesome too. I keep writing them down because she has such great insight to our subject matter because art can interpret so many things. I think I will definitely collaborate with an art teacher in my lesson plans to gain a new view as to how traditional forms of literature can be transformed into something more meaningful and representative of the students who read it.
To continue on this topic, I want to first say as I was reading you post I remembered that magically feeling I got when reading. I remember creating my own characters and imagining how they would look and sound. Even though books are from one persons perspective, they allow more freedom in creating your own visions. Movies remind me of your description of teachers, they force you to see the story from their view, and halt all extra imagination. I think reading and viewing art is similar. Even creating art. The process allows you to remove yourself from reality and enter a whole new world, one that is your own. I think this interaction is what made me love reading (even though I forgot about that love) and truly love art. As an educator you should really focus on how to get each student to enter this experience because they might not all be able to. Since these are our majors, we are prone to enjoying them. I also think it is important (although I agree with you on the magic of touching each page and smelling a new book, or physically making art and enjoying the mess) to keep up with technology since this could be how we engage our students into their own altered reality. I think it's important to consider that they will feel this magical feeling towards technology, which is the feeling we get towards reading a book or creating art. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and getting me thinking!
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