Neuroscience and the novel: Strange Bedfellows

This is the fabulous poster that has been put together by the Strange Bedfellows team in advance of my talk there on Thursday. I'll be speaking particularly about my attempt, in A Box of Birds, to trace the limits of neuroscientific framings of human experience and behaviour on the pages of the novel and beyond.

Science and fiction: once more with links

A few weeks ago, during the Edinburgh Book Festival, I was asked to contribute to the Guardian's 'What I'm thinking about...' series which was capturing some of the debates and conversations going on in Charlotte Square Gardens. A few of the links didn't make it through into the published piece, so here it is again with all the links reinstated:

Whether it’s finding bosons or parking cars on Mars, science can give fictional characters a whole lot of different new things to think about. But can the influence ever work in the other direction—can scientists ever find inspiration in fiction? That’s a question that came up at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this weekend. In the first of a series of events funded by the Wellcome Trust, I was in conversation with the US novelist Ben Marcus, whose novel The Flame Alphabet thrillingly recasts language as a deadly toxin, forcing us to rethink its relations with private thought and public communication. One thing we talked about was how the sciences of human experience, including psychology and cognitive neuroscience, have to be interested in that experience from the inside. There’s no better way of getting at the subjectivity of an individual consciousness than through a skilful fictional narrative. Fiction can also be a laboratory for testing out different explanations of human behaviour. When Darwinism and psychoanalysis reshaped our conceptions of humanity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers were there as barometers of those new understandings. Neuroscience promises a similarly profound shift in how we make sense of ourselves, and we can look to writers to explore whether brain science will ultimately provide us with satisfactory accounts of who we are.

Memory is another area where the insights of writers can spark scientific enquiry. You could argue that all novels are at some level about memory, and writings on the topic are a rich source on the subjectivity of the experience. Autobiographical memory is defined as our memory for the events of our own lives, and the recent science of this topic forces us to rethink it in quite a radical way. Rather than recording events like a video camera, we reconstruct past events by integrating many different kinds of information, creating a kind of multimedia collage which can differ subtly from telling to retelling. In immersing myself in this topic, I didn’t only look at the work of scientists. Novelists have always been attuned to the vagaries of autobiographical memory, from Proust’s writings about the links between memory, sensation and emotion to A. S. Byatt’s delineation of subtle phenomenological distinctions between kinds of early memory. Looking further back, medieval writers turn out to have been remarkably prescient about memory’s recombinative, future-oriented function, while the understanding of narrative has been highlighted as a limiting factor on small children’s ability to do autobiographical memory. If we want a better understanding of how the brain tells stories about the past, it seems that we could do worse than read fiction.

This ‘reconstructive’ view of memory also raises questions about the genre of life writing. When we read a memoir, we are often asked to take the vividness of the memory as a guarantee of its veracity. In contrast, writers like Janice Galloway have been praised for acknowledging the narrative, storytelling nature of memory. At her event on Sunday, I had the chance to ask Galloway whether memoirists should do more to acknowledge the reconstructive nature of their art. From the writer’s point of view, she responded, there is no ‘should’ about it; each life-writer has to negotiate their own relationship with the past. Artful, emotionally charged narratives, like our own ordinary and precious memories, will always hold a distinctive kind of truth, whether or not they are literally accurate representations of what happened.

A note on some upcoming talks

I've got a busy run-up to Christmas talking about Pieces of Light, A Box of Birds and other things.

On Saturday 6 October I'll be at the Wigtown Book Festival talking about memory. It'll be my first time at this festival, and I'm looking forward to a variety of treats including a strand celebrating their famous starry skies, and some big names including Sara Maitland, Marina Warner, Jon Ronson and James Kelman. You can see the full programme here.

On Friday 12 and Saturday 13 October I'll be at the Institute of Philosophy in London talking about memory and narrative in a conference on narrative and self-understanding in psychiatric disorder. I'll be talking about some of the memory distortions that I wrote about in Pieces of Light.

On Thursday 18 October I'll be at the University of York talking about 'Neuroscience and the novel: Strange Bedfellows?' This talk will be part of the Strange Bedfellows programme exploring relations between creativity and criticism. I'll be talking about A Box of Birds and my experiences of trying to combine science and fiction-writing. There'll be a particular focus on my attempt, in A Box of Birds, to trace the limits of neuroscientific framings of human experience and behaviour on the pages of the novel and beyond.

On Wednesday 24 October I head to Berlin for the Experimental Entanglements in Cognitive Neuroscience workshop. My title is 'If thinking is dialogic, who's doing the talking?'

Saturday 27 October sees me back in Durham for the Durham Book Festival. I'll be hosting a School of Life event on 'Thriving not Surviving' with my School of Life colleagues Philippa Perry, John-Paul Flintoff, Roman Krznaric and Tom Chatfield. I'll then be doing a special event on A Box of Birds, talking about how the novel came to be and its relations with the science of memory and consciousness. The event will be chaired by Professor Simon James of Durham's English Department.

On Wednesday 31 October I'll be speaking at the Psychosis Special Interest Group at Durham University on the inner speech model of voice-hearing and auditory verbal hallucinations, as part of our Wellcome-funded 'Hearing the Voice' project.

On the weekend of 24 and 25 November, I'll be in Cheltenham participating in the Medicine Unboxed 2012 conference. The theme is 'Belief' and the speakers include Richard Holloway, Sebastian Faulks, Jo Shapcott and Bryan Appleyard. I'll be talking about A Box of Birds and offering some thoughts on neuromaterialism reductionism and the refuge of art.

Finally, I'll be in conversation with the novelist, poet and memoirist Blake Morrison at the University of London on Tuesday 27 November. Our theme will be 'Memoir and Memory', and the event is part of a series entitled 'Life Writing: borderlands between fact and fiction', organised by the Open University and University of London.

A Box of Birds: update

The final edit of A Box of Birds is now complete. The production schedule means that those who supported the book (thank you!) should receive their copies before the end of the year.

There is still time to order the special edition and be listed as a subscriber.

There should be some cover art soon and I'll post it on this blog as soon as I can.

I'll be doing a special event around the book at the Durham Book Festival on Saturday 27 October. I'll be in conversation with Professor Simon James from the English Department at Durham, and will be talking about Pieces of Light as well.

In November I'll be talking about A Box of Birds at Medicine Unboxed 2012 in Cheltenham.

The trade edition of the novel will appear in May.

Pieces Of Light: publication day

I began my last book with an interview. The subject was my three-year-old daughter, Athena, and I was asking her what she remembered about her babyhood. Unsurprisingly, she didn't have much to say for herself (apart from offering the detail that 'It were very sunny'). I was asking her to do something quite difficult: inviting her to travel back into her own past and relive moments of it from the inside. That's a tall order, cognitively speaking, and so it comes as no surprise that it takes children some time to master the skill.

That encounter with Athena's memory was one of the most interesting aspects of that project, and it promised a fertile topic for a new non-fiction book. In Pieces of Light: The new science of memory, I have tried to write about the science of autobiographical memory in a way that does justice to the human stories behind it. Our memories are constructions—fictions, of a sort, which nevertheless do a pretty good job of keeping us in touch with the events of our lives. From the first chapter:

I think that if we are really to unpick the mysteries of memory, we need to put the story back into the science. One of my aims in this book is to capture the first-person nature of memory, the rememberer’s capacity to reinhabit the recalled moment and experience it again from the inside. The great memory scientist Endel Tulving called this quality of memory ‘autonoetic consciousness’, and explaining it is one of the biggest challenges for memory researchers. The scientific need for replicable experimental findings has meant that the personal, subjective quality of memory has often been ignored, although this tendency has begun to be redressed in recent years, with a new movement towards exploring the qualitative and the narrative. Memory researchers now spend more time getting to know their participants’ individual stories, whether they concern the beguiling confabulations spun by those whose memory systems have failed them, or the sensually rich ‘first memories’ produced when people are interviewed about their very early childhoods. I want to do the same thing, letting the stories speak for themselves in illustrating the fragile and complex truths of memory.

Pieces of Light is the story of some of those stories. I talk to the very young and the very old, individuals who are still, in middle age, arguing over childhood memories with other members of their family, and people whose ability to remember has been changed by trauma and brain damage. I look at what we can learn about memory by getting lost in space as well as in time, uncover the links between memory and imagination, and find out how a return to a familiar place can unlock memories of people who are lost. It's been a fascinating journey for me, and I'd love to know what you think of the book that has resulted.

Pieces of Light is published today in the UK by Profile Books. It will be published in the US by HarperCollins in March 2013, and a Spanish translation is already in progress. There have been a couple of early reviews: this one in Nature and this in New Scientist. I was also lucky enough to get some wonderful pre-publication quotes from Daniel Schacter, Elizabeth Loftus, Douwe Draaisma, Jonah Lehrer and David Eagleman.

How Stephen Fry made me do it

As I get closer to the finishing line with A Box Of Birds, I thought I'd tell the story of how I got my first fiction published.

I'd never had any success with getting stories into print. I was finishing off my PhD at Cambridge, and I'd had a poem accepted in the May Anthologies the previous year. The guest editor had been Seamus Heaney, so you can imagine what a trip that had sent me on. That year I had been on the student-run selection committee (no advantage since we—quite properly—weren't allowed to vote for ourselves). We felt that we were doing something important with some pieces of writing that showed huge promise, and that we might even be helping to launch some careers.

For the next year's prose anthology, Stephen Fry agreed to be the guest editor. I sent in my submission, waited, and eventually heard that it had been shortlisted by the selection committee. The next step was for the shortlisted entries to be posted off to Stephen, who would read them through and make his selection.  

I didn't feel particularly hopeful. I'd had lots of rejections from literary magazines, and I'd come to assume that people just didn't get what I was trying to do (it's the excuse I still make to myself). Also, I was a Natural Scientist, and everyone else was studying literature and had read everything and could deconstruct texts very cleverly. They knew about Jane Austen. I knew about language development in children. It didn't seem to be a great platform for an assault on the literary world. 

I got lucky, however. Stephen picked twelve stories and one of them was mine. 

It was called 'A Photograph', and it was about adolescent sex and a tribute band called The New South Wales Police. I was very young, in my early twenties. In his foreword to the collection, Stephen wrote: 

You will not find bombast, precocity, self-indulgence or self-importance here. You will find stories that are magnetically readable, memorable and moving. 

When I look at those stories now, particularly my own, I feel that Stephen was being kind. A couple of days before I heard that 'A Photograph' had been accepted, I wondered in my diary whether I was angry enough to be a writer. 'I'm playing,' I wrote. 'I'm feigning. I have this little uninteresting life and, worse, this little uninteresting mind. I shouldn't be bothering.'

Actually, when I read back through my diary from that time, I can see that I was pretty angry, but about the wrong things. I was angry at people for not responding to submissions, for apparently not being interested in fiction that took risks and tried to go somewhere new. I was angry, but not in the right way. I wasn't yet able to channel that deep sense of outrage that propels a writer—to persuade my readers that there was something important that needed saying, and that I was the person to say it. When my dad died, three years later, I had plenty to be angry about. I think my writing changed then. I haven't really continued with short stories, although I have huge respect and admiration for the form. I've been drawn to the bigger canvas of the novel, the space it gives you to master a perspective and send lives into collision with each other.

I was writing a novel back then—my first—and struggling with it. (It was never published.) There were things I was supposed to be doing: applying for fellowships, securing an academic job, and joining the race to become a professor before the age of forty (or whatever other daft self-imposed goals seemed to matter to giddy young academics). I wasn't just losing the pace: I was turning on my heels and sprinting off in the wrong direction.

It was 1994. Looking back, I feel I could have saved myself so much pain. Nothing's going to happen any time soon, I would have told myself. Forget your daily word count. Forget the agents and those hopeful submissions. Wait. Enjoy it for what it is. Master your craft. And, in twenty years' time, you might have something to show for it. 

In later years, the May Anthologies (now the Mays) went on to discover a few literary names, most famously Zadie Smith. Stephen didn't do too badly either. 

Crowd-funding: the endgame

A Box of Birds is now 78% funded. Hundreds of people have played a part already in helping me to make this book happen, and now we’re into the final phase.

I still need around a hundred more supporters. Please pass the message on to your friends, use Twitter and Facebook and generally spread the word. You can see who has already pledged by going here.

This blog post has a summary of the publicity I’ve been doing and details of some forthcoming events. I've answered some questions about the crowd-funding process here.

I've been working on this novel for more than a decade, and so you'll understand why I'm keen for it to see the light of day. I’ve loved every moment of the writing process, and I can’t think of any better way I could have spent the time. I hope that that joy comes across in the writing. The first three chapters have already been published in my Unbound shed, but I’ve put them together in a handy .pdf if you haven’t yet had a look.

Some of my Unbound stablemates have been writing about what crowd-funding means to them. Katy Brand explains why she chose Unbound over traditional publishers, and Stevyn Colgan has been reflecting on his own experience of crowd-funding his new book.

Things happen to Unbound books. Tibor Fischer published his new collection with them and it was recently chosen for the Fiction Uncovered promotion. Unbound books can get noticed and win prizes. Several people told me that crowd-funding a literary thriller was an ambitious thing to be doing. It's taken some work, but it's happening.

Some may feel that £20 is a lot to pay for a book, and we’re certainly used to paying less online. Bear in mind, though, that the author pays for those sensational online discounts, by losing up to 60% of their already modest percentage. Unbound’s model is much fairer for the author, with a basic 50% profit share with the publisher. And you are investing in a writer's talent and ideas, by supporting a book that would otherwise not see the light of day.

Please help me to cross the finishing line. I’ve set out some ideas for what you can do to help in this blog post. Whilst you’re at it, have a look at some of the other wonderful books on offer. Unbound books make great presents, but they also make great books happen.