What do you want in a story? Literary prowess? Action? Interesting characters? Why do you like some stories and not others? Research may reveal something we'd rather not know about our preferences.

Predictability and pattern. It seems that the human brain is wired that way. People like to make predictions and when they are rewarded with the predicted outcome, they are happy. Predicable, as opposed to predicted, outcomes are the best, though. If we get a conclusion we could have predicted but didn't, we will exalt that writer.

A scientific paper in the Journal of Neuroscience, April 15, 2001,* described an investigation into stimulus/reward patterns using Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI. The paper describes how both predictability and unexpected reward interplay to reinforce a pleasurable experience.

Hollywood has known about this for decades. And television programmers have honed the exploitation of predictability to a fine edge. Science is only now explaining what the entertainment industry has relied upon--perhaps from time immemorial. It seems that the human mind must look for patterns and try to predict from them. Add to this biological urge for prediction, humankind's highest intellectual adaptation: symbolic language, and you have the basis for all of the literary and performing arts.

These activities take place in the brain's cortex, the higher brain, where understanding happens and associations are made. They are different from the activities produced by predictable access to a basic biological requirement for water or juice. Those prediction/reward transactions are processed in the primitive brain.

So, what does this mean to you as a reader? For one thing, it may explain why you like certain authors and not others. An author who shares your point of view, presents patterned information in the way you understand it best and leads you to a predictable, if not predicted, outcome is one you will look for on the shelves of your favorite book seller. This insight also explains why many of us will sit through a mediocre movie or TV show, knowing all the while how it will resolve but intent on seeing the outcome. We've made predictions and we want to be right. In most cases, we've made a pretty safe bet.

These findings, recently reinforced by additional research, aren't exactly an earth-shattering revelation. They do allow a certain forgivness to take place. If we are responding to our biological nature, then perhaps we can avoid that guilty feeling when we waste another hour watching The Sopranos. Our cortex made us do it.

Robert Marcom
Houston, Texas
Managing Director
NetAuthor.org/E2K

* Predictability Modulates Human Brain Response to Reward. Gregory S. Berns, Samuel M. McClure, Giuseppe Pagnoni, and P. Read Montague. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, and Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Division of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030.
http://www.ccnl.emory.edu/greg/Koolaid_JN_Print.pdf