Reading and Memory

by Sheila Connolly

As I read my newspaper at dawn this morning (I'm trying to avoid the heat—five a.m. can be very pleasant, I've found, and yes, I still read a paper made of paper), my eye was caught by a short article in the "Be Well" section, with the headline "Reading and writing preserves memory, researchers say."

Briefly: Researchers at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, where there is a Memory and Aging Project (per their website, still recruiting participants, if you're interested) announced this week that a multi-year study they have conducted strongly suggests that "participants who reported reading and writing throughout their life, especially in old age, were 32 percent less likely to show deterioration in brain regions involved in memory," and "those who reported infrequently reading and writing into old age experienced a 48 percent faster rate of memory loss."

I feel so much better.  Okay, the study involved only three hundred octogenarians and depended upon answers to a survey (and we all know they aren't always accurate) as well as physical observations upon autopsy, but it's encouraging nonetheless.  The old adage "use it or lose it" still applies.

I've been reading before I can remember, and I've never slowed down, as my overflowing bookshelves can attest.  I've been writing for over a decade now (longer if you want to count academic papers in my younger days, as well as grant proposals and reports a decade or two later).  But who knew that I was preserving brain cells all the while?

Carl Sagan is reported to have said, "The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous." How rare is it that something that feels good is also good for us?  And even better, we as writers are performing a valuable service to our readers, by providing them with books that will help sustain their brain function for years.

And now I have another justification for all those books in my To-Be-Read pile:  I'm stockpiling therapeutic tools.  I'm not sure how well that rationale (rationalization?) applies to the thousands of books I've saved over the years, but I might want to reread them.  Would it be a sign of aging if I can't remember whodunnit in some of them?

Memory is a tricky thing.  Sometimes we rewrite our own, or we selectively mask or erase certain parts.  I had an odd conversation with my husband this weekend, when I described in detail a wonderful O'Keefe and Merritt gas stove we had in the first house we owned, and he had no memory of it at all.  (For the record, he used it as much as I did.) Wiped from his databanks.

In return, he accuses me of blotting out the second car we bought together.  Maybe.  I think he drove it a lot more than I did, commuting to work. I had a different car at the same time, and I can tell you a lot more about that one.

Sometimes these days I feel the need to document everything in the house, particularly items I've inherited from four generations of my family, because I'm the only one who knows what they are and where and who they came from, and my daughter won't know what each piece means, when she comes to inherit it.  I haven't done it yet.  But this weekend I sorted through my t-shirt collection, and I can still tell you when I acquired each one, and where and why. Maybe I'm just practicing. (I have a lot of t-shirts.)

But reading is something else.  It seems to be using a different part of our brain.  I'll be happy to sacrifice my memories of my t-shirts if I can continue to enjoy reading and writing.

Right Brain or Left Brain

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I was reading a review in the New Yorker about a crime-themed television show and came upon the citation of the following statement from the "showrunner" (I'm still trying to figure out what that title means) of a different crime-themed television show, who had said that:

Either it's a left-brain journey, where you're just connecting the dots of who the suspects are, or it's more of a holistic journey where a young girl is murdered, these are the potential subjects, and this is why.

I said "aha!" because this resonates with me:  I argue with my editor all the time about it.  I'm usually far more interested in why the victim ended up dead—who would have wanted to kill him/her?—than in setting up a list of possible suspects and knocking them off the fence one at a time.

The thing is, I seem to be a right-brain writer, but I'm a left-brain person.  Oh, I know, my editor is saying now, "but where's your protagonist's emotional response to the body/the big reveal?" I'll concede that my protagonists tend to be observers and analysts.  They do not dissolve into floods of tears in a crisis, they simply take in the situation and act accordingly.  So I'm a macro right-brain writer, but a micro left-brain one.

I know, this is over-simplified.  Nobody is entirely one or the other.  I did, however, take a quickie on-line test and it showed overwhelming left-brain dominance.  I wasn't surprised.

What's the basic definition?  Right brain:  emotional, intuitive, creative; likes music, images and colors.  Left brain:  prefers logic and reasoning; is more comfortable with language (putting things into words rather than responding emotionally) and numbers.  Think Kirk vs. Spock, Napoleon Solo vs. Ilya Kuriakin, or…Castle vs. Beckett?  Of the first two pairs, you can guess which one I preferred.  For the last…I'd like to hang out with Castle, but I'd rather be Beckett.

Maybe I'm just confused.  I was once an art historian, so I must like images.  Except that I spent a lot of time analyzing images, not wallowing in their beauty.  Pretty colors make me happy.  But then, I love languages, which may explain why I can speaks bits and pieces of at least five.  But I hate math.  Still, overall I like to think of myself as logical and analytical.

But does that work for writing?  To me, understanding human interactions, and an individual's response to particular circumstances, and then conveying that effectively to readers, is the best possible goal. We talk about "character-driven" versus "plot-driven" stories, and it should be noted that the great majority of mystery readers are women, who are generally credited with greater emotional responses, so they should (in theory) respond to the first category.  On the flip side, male readers tend to prefer books in which taciturn men blow things up and shoot people, with the occasional detour to spend about fifteen minutes with a woman (think Jack Reacher). Funny thing—the latter sell better and get more press.  Go figure.

When we write in a genre, and I do since I'm a full-blown cozy writer, we know there are guidelines to be followed.  If the genre is thrillers, there must be, well, thrills; in cozies, there must be cats and crafts and kooky sidekicks.  I get that.  But I keep trying to sneak in a few more substantial elements, and I think I've arrived at what one reviewer called a "meaty" cozy.  I like that. Maybe my two brains are actually working and playing together these days.