Your Brain On Fiction Analysis

The two readings I have chosen are Your Brain On Fiction by Annie Murphy Paul which is about how different parts of your brain react to certain words or phrases, and Is Creativity Sexy? The Evolutionary Advantages of Artistic Thinking by Sam McNerney which talks about the connection between sex and creativity. Murphy Paul and McNerney did a satisfying job keeping me concerned throughout the reading starting with the relations with gender, the title and the evolution with science.

One thing that kept me interested in Sam McNerney’s article was how when it came to creativity and sex it depended on gender and motivational state, as said at the beginning of paragraph six. I can understand why people would agree with this because of the stereotype

Being interested in this I wondered how our brains and fiction are related, after reading i left like i was back in my highschool days in biology class learning about all the parts of the brain like the wernicke's area and the broca's area. I began to relate to what the text was saying, when mentioned in paragraph three “Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.” i clicked into how this works. They say smell is where we hold the most of our memories and it makes sense, when i read the word cinnamon i think of the smell, texture and the trend that went around getting people to eat spoonfuls of cinnamon. Sam’s title stood out to me because of the word “sexy”, but honestly speaking when does that word ever not stand out? Bringing my curiosity to the title the word “creativity” also struck my attention because now i wanted to know if creativity was sexy? and how do those two words relate to each

Annies text is literally about the brain while McNerney mentions it but it is more so about the research being made. The progress we made with science has come far, whether it be about technology or humans. Sams starts off his article talking about how quickly our technology has progressed and humans began to be more creative, as said in the text “ Human evolution is puzzling. Around 45000 years ago, for no obvious reason, our species took off. Our technology progressed, populations thrived, and we started painting and crafting instruments.” Annie talks a little about it in the beginning of her reading by mentioning “Amid the squawking and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can see, faded, even futile.” I partially agree with this because I tend to read fictional books on my phone and then buy the hard copy just to have but I also buy hard copies of books and actually read them. she also mentions in the text that “scientists have come to realized in the past few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well,” mentioning this makes me realised that we as humans have advanced to make these realizations and we’ve advanced the technology to be able to do