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Reading Vera Tobin’s Elements of Surprise<\/em> for New Scientist<\/em>, 5 May 2018<\/a><\/p>\n How do characters and events in fiction differ from those in real life? And what is it about our experience of life that fiction exaggerates, omits or captures to achieve its effects?<\/p>\n Effective fiction is Vera Tobin\u2019s subject. And as a cognitive scientist, she knows how pervasive and seductive it can be, even in \u2013 or perhaps especially in \u2013 the controlled environment of an experimental psychology lab.<\/p>\n Suppose, for instance, you want to know which parts of the brain are active when forming moral judgements, or reasoning about false beliefs. These fields and others rest on fMRI brain scans. Volunteers receive short story prompts with information about outcomes or character intentions and, while their brains are scanned, have to judge what other characters ought to know or do.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a consequence,\u201d writes Tobin in her new book Elements of Surprise, \u201cmuch research that is putatively about how people think about other humans\u2026 tells us just as much, if not more, about how study participants think about characters in constructed narratives.\u201d<\/p>\n Tobin is weary of economists banging on about the \u201cflaws\u201d in our cognitive apparatus. \u201cThe science on this phenomenon has tended to focus on cataloguing errors people make in solving problems or making decisions,\u201d writes Tobin, \u201cbut\u2026 its place and status in storytelling, sense-making, and aesthetic pleasure deserve much more attention.\u201d<\/p>\n Tobin shows how two major \u201cflaws\u201d in our thinking are in fact the necessary and desirable consequence of our capacity for social interaction. First, we wildly underestimate our differences. We model each other in our heads and have to assume this model is accurate, even while we\u2019re revising it, moment to moment. At the same time, we have to assume no one else has any problem performing this task \u2013 which is why we\u2019re continually mortified to discover other people have no idea who we really are.<\/p>\n Similarly, we find it hard to model the mental states of people, including our past selves, who know less about something than we do. This is largely because we forget how we came to that privileged knowledge.<\/p>\n \u201cTobin is weary of economists banging on about the \u2018flaws\u2019 in our cognitive apparatus\u201d And what about Emma, titular heroine of Jane Austen\u2019s novel? She \u201cis all too ready to presume that her intentions are unambiguous to others and has great difficulty imagining, once she has arrived at an interpretation of events, that others might believe something different\u201d, says Tobin. Austen\u2019s brilliance was to fashion a plot in which Emma experiences revelations that confront the consequences of her \u201ccursed thinking\u201d \u2013 a cognitive bias making us assume any person with whom we communicate has the background knowledge to understand what is being said.<\/p>\n Just as we assume others know what we\u2019re thinking, we assume our past selves thought as we do now. Detective stories exploit this foible. Mildred Pierce, Michael Curtiz\u2019s 1945 film, begins at the end, as it were, depicting the story\u2019s climactic murder. We are fairly certain we know who did it, but we flashback to the past and work forward to the present only to find that we have misinterpreted everything.<\/p>\n I confess I was underwhelmed on finishing this excellent book. But then I remembered Sherlock Holmes\u2019s complaint (mentioned by Tobin) that once he reveals the reasoning behind his deductions, people are no longer impressed by his singular skill. Tobin reveals valuable truths about the stories we tell to entertain each other, and those we tell ourselves to get by, and how they are related. Like any good magic trick, it is obvious once it has been explained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reading Vera Tobin’s Elements of Surprise for New Scientist, 5 May 2018 How do characters and events in fiction differ from those in real life? And what is it about our experience of life that fiction exaggerates, omits or captures … Continue reading
\nThere are implications for autism, too. It is, Tobin says, unlikely that many people with autism \u201clack\u201d an understanding that others think differently \u2013 known as \u201ctheory of mind\u201d. It is more likely they have difficulty inhibiting their knowledge when modelling others\u2019 mental states.<\/p>\n