Cognitive Craft: How Four Writers Speak to Readers’ Senses

In these times of global crises, people’s ability to imagine matters more than ever. This project seeks to combine the approaches of fiction writers, literary scholars, and natural scientists to sensory experience in order to understand how people in the digital and global age (from the mid-1990s onward) respond to written verbal cues with mental images that integrate sensations from different senses, such as vision and touch. It examines how these multimodal mental images can acquire the vividness and immediacy of lived experiences.

No two human brains work exactly alike, and the ways that people integrate tactile, motor, auditory, visual, olfactory, and gustatory information are only dimly understood. Research over the past two decades by neuroscientists such as Simon Lacey, Krish Sathian, and Charles Spence suggests that sensory integration occurs earlier in neural processing than originally thought. It indicates that brain regions traditionally associated with certain modalities, such as vision, might be better understood as specialized for particular functions, such as navigation, that draw on information from multiple sensory systems. Fiction writers who draw on sensory memories to craft evocative language work with imagery that is already co-constituted by different modalities. For readers, verbal cues also work ‘top-down,’ by invoking past sensory impressions that have long since been combined in sensory imagery. 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, Emily Troscianko, and Elaine Auyoung, who have conducted groundbreaking research into how creative writers enable experiences of fictional worlds.

Because representations and understandings of sensory experiences vary across time and culture, this project focuses on four novels by contemporary English-language authors whose 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. The writing of Danticat, Roy, Vera, and Díaz invites readers to simulate what the characters may be feeling by urging them to reenact and recombine their own relevant sensory experiences. Researchers of all disciplines 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 the inner lives of those underrepresented in research.

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 across literary context, i.e., in narrative exposition, dialogue, or chapter openings or conclusions?