Primo Jim Tanya Huntington Hyde - Literal

ley, is leading the way using neuroscience, to show how
word pictures are formed that report enlightenment and
enjoyment from the brain to the mind. It is our nature
as sentient beings.
It basically comes to this. Words, just like images, can
evoke strong reactions and responses. This is the same
dopamine pathway in the brain operating as it does with
a fi ne coc au vin, a chocolate truffl e, a nice Burgundy and
making love. We are not—cannot be—easily disembodied
from our words. We are by nature sensate.
Lakoff argues we become disembodied when the
mind—or is it the brain—fails to associate freely and is
instead harnessed into logic and syllogisms and structures
where the neural inspiration leaves the thought.
In other words, there is no giant equation or logic out
there that will explain the world. Logic and math are
just languages for translating nature. Some day, the
ah-ha moment of enlightenment and understanding
might get captured in a brain scan like an x-ray of philosophy.
Lakoff explained to me that about 98% of thought
is not conscious. That’s why facts, unless they have
“frames” around them, don’t matter. These are the
worldviews going into the words we use. Our morality
and politics come from what our brains are doing below
the conscious level.
36 4 LITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES FALL, 2008
Furthermore, everyone has mirror neurons that
fi re up when you do something or see someone doing
something, he explains. That’s why we can have feelings
of fear, anger and happiness when we see it in others. It
is how we empathize. Those neurons fi re up more when
we cooperate, he adds. We are biologically wired for
cooperation.
Now here’s the astounding part. Lakoff says empathy
has to be developed and used or the brain will atrophy.
And that brave new world insight is the strongest
case for the arts, creativity and the worldviews coming
from writers’ words.
Brain science is telling us what we did not know
about dialog, that it sparks dopamine and it gives readers
a strange comfort and solidarity with the writer.
If anyone thinks brain science portends the end of
literature as a way to understand humans, think again.
Think what Persaline, Scarlett Johansen’s character, said
in the movie A Love Song for Bobby Long: “Everybody
knows books are better than life. That’s why there’re
books.”
Jos é de la Isla is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and author
of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003) and the forthcoming
Day Night Life Death Hope (2008).