Critical Thinking - Emotion and Memory

It’s become fairly accepted lately that emotion has a distinct effect on memory. Not the “valance” of the emotion (whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant) but the “arousal”—the extent to which the emotion induces a physiological response. Arousal involves the brain stem, the endocrine system, and the nervous system. It motivates certain behaviors, from the impulse to search for food to the instinct to run away. Baseline arousal levels can determine whether someone is introverted or extroverted. My husband has a low level, thus requiring more stimuli, such as watching sports and talking to live people, to interest him. Mine is pretty high. I think a nap is stimulating enough.

So, back to memory. An experience with strong emotional arousal (Stop snickering! It’s a scientific term.) jumpstarts all that stuff in your brain that induces you to remember it better. The more exciting or agitating, the more action in your brain. Women are more affected than men; younger people are more affected than older (who have what I like to call “emotional inertia”). And the memory of the event is generally stronger when the person is experiencing the same emotion (fear, hatred, lust, relief) they were feeling during the initial incident.

What does that have to do with you? Let me ask you this: Do the stories you read have to be filled with action and suspense (physical or emotional)? Or are you content with more description?

Here’s another one. When you write, what do you write? Hard-hitting, mile-a-minute plots, or meandering stories?

One more. How far are you willing to go to make sure your book or story is remembered?

The first novel I wrote meandered. It has action, but it also has entire chapters dedicated to the explanation of jet engines. I had to be told to add more plot, more suspense. Now I know why. I have a naturally occurring high-functioning cortical (I'm an introvert). The book was memorable, but for the character-based tension, not anything in the plot. There’s a lot more plot in there, now.

How many action movies out there are exclusively about explosions and plot? Okay, how many good ones? In A Man Apart, Vin Diesel fights for revenge. In Red Dawn, they fight for each other. The new Star Trek movie does it right. It combines emotional journeys for the characters (Kirk’s revenge for his father, McCoy’s bitterness about his wife, Spock and Uhura?!), a suspenseful, exciting plot, and simultaneously fed the pre-established emotional connection of the audience. (Did anyone else notice the Australian who jumped to the platform with Kirk and Sulu was wearing a red suit?) In doing so, it elicits an emotional, physiological response from the viewer, thus ensuring it will be remembered.

The mention of Star Trek brings up another thought—most of the audience walked in bearing a sympathetic relationship with the characters. The emotional valance was already established. I imagine that made the emotional arousal much easier to pull off. And may shed some light on the publishing industry’s obsession with sequels.

Twilight. What can I say about Twilight? Plot-meandering, emotion-arousing. Which means that certain scenes are memorable. Very simple plot with a few emotion-grabbing spots. The rest is like Chinese food. The moment you put it down, you feel a little bit empty.

This is as opposed to the circuitous, ambitious (sometimes over-ambitious) multiple plots of Harry Potter. Not as much emotion in Harry Potter. (To be fair, Twilight is a YA romance. It’s supposed to be emotional.)

I don’t know that I have an all-encompassing thought, here, other than just to point out that this is something to think about while we all write. Henry talked about inappropriate insertion of political beliefs earlier. Authors don’t limit their indulgences to politics. (Anyone read Clan of the Cave Bear? One-third plot, one-third treatise on the domestic habits of Neanderthals, one-third smut. And which part do you remember best?) But politics and anthropology— (Okay, this reminds me of a friend’s book. She spent two chapters having her MC wander around his new castle, visiting each and every shop from the coopers to the midden heap. I said she was showing off how much she knew about the life and times of the Middle Ages. She said he had to take the tour to find the bad mojo in the chapel.) As I was saying, politics and anthropology are merely indulgent; an inappropriate expression of the author’s interests and personality. Emotional scenes, whether it be lust-inducing like Bella and Edward gazing across the lunch room at each other, or anxious like Frodo fighting Gollum for the ring, make you remember the book. Which means you think about the book more. And are more likely to recommend it to a friend or buy something else from the author.

So, where’s that line? Do you add a sex scene just to keep your readers’ attention? Plenty of movies and TV shows do. How to you elicit an emotional response (other than lust) from your readers without going off the deep end and writing four entire books dedicated to the shrine of teenage angst?

I’m not entirely sure. But I’m going to try to write about it, anyway.

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Kersley Fitzgerald (who became officially old yesterday) did promise you an in-depth comparison between Twilight and Harry Potter. And then she heard the screams of horror emanating from teh interwebs. But the more she thought about the two series, the more she felt inclined to search deeper than POV faux pas and grammatical errors. Consider this, and the next, article “inspired by” the comparison between Twilight and HP.