A Distortion of Fact
Issue 97
Most contemporary non-fiction books take three hundred pages to tell a one hundred page story. There’s typically a decent premise in the beginning, an impetus that brings pen to paper, but not quite enough to justify revving up the printer. Lots of popular science books, most technology books, and pretty much every political book has this fault: there’s no expansion beyond the premise. What you find is mere elaboration, a stretching and stressing of an idea, until both idea and reader are left exhausted. And that means there’s no complication, nor any narrative trajectory, there’s no synthesis to shove the reader forward, which leaves chapters that should be paragraphs, paragraphs that should be sentences, and too many sentences that should have been cut: the raw material of ideas-per-page that justifies chopping down a tree for a popular non-fiction book simply never appears.
Projections by Karl Deisseroth, a Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, happens to be a notable exception. But this isn’t because Deisseroth introduces and explains the development of Optogenetics—the controlling of neurons by light waves. Nor is it because Deisseroth has a remarkable personal story that fascinates the reader. And I also wouldn’t credit his retelling of scientific progress, in how our understanding of evolution has shaped our understanding of psychological drives, as the crucial element that makes this book different. What’s different, instead, is how Deisseroth links these three narratives—each one coalescing with what’s come before, each one triggering what comes next, a bit like how a repetitive motif in a good novel develops as you read. All of this work ensures that his book grows beyond any of his individual narratives, with the resulting synthesis greater than a simple addition of three, turning what is normally flat and uninspiring into what you could rightly call a story.
Although quoting Toni Morrison and John Milton and James Joyce in your book about the neuroscience of emotion is one way to catch my attention. Especially because so many people create an artificial divide between disciplines. Plenty of mathematicians, for instance, explain away painting as a childish pastime, one that’s amusing and perhaps a decent hobby but with no bearing on what’s most fundamental to life; and plenty of painters, it is worth remembering, find the mathematicians rather stuffy and materialist and completely lacking in any ability to deal with the true essence of humanity. So we end up with mathematicians who can’t explain infinity or fractals or the consequences of general relativity with even a touch of coherence. And we also end up with painters who don’t truly comprehend da Vinci or Kandinsky or Mondrian beyond what’s in front of their eyes. So if you’re going to write about neuroscience, or about the latest research in understanding our evolutionary drives, in a way that reveals how these discoveries explore what’s most fundamental about being human, you’re going to need a pile of novelists and at least a handful of poets.
Deisseroth’s passion for literature—which is apparent in his literary references, and in his artful sentences—propels the book forward. It is not a mere explanation of the science, or a mere chronology of recent discoveries, but it begins to approach the realm of storytelling, with the tools of fiction used to pull the reader along.
The tapestry of the human story has its own warp threads, rooted deep in the gorges of East Africa—connecting the shifting textures of human life over millions of years—spanning pictographs backdropped by crevassed ice, by angulated forestry, by stone and steel, and by glowing rare earths.
But where non-fiction ends and fiction begins does become rather slippery. The distinction starts to fade once you write a sufficient amount of lines, though this isn’t to deny the concept of truth, or to make a silly claim about grand narratives. It is, instead, a recognition of how much each word shifts the trajectory of a paragraph. It is about how much a change in emphasis affects meaning. It is about how much the most inconsequential adjustment in perspective alters an entire story. You might insist on your precision, you might believe that you’re merely dealing with facts, that your writing is about, for instance, law or engineering or finance, so naturally your field contains nothing but evidence and tangible truths. You might put fiction somewhere else entirely, far away from the rigor, sophistication, and fidelity that you demand in your writing, but you’re still trapped with the same mess of human language as the fiction writer. Regardless of the sharpness of your subject, your words will be stuck in sludge, with all the ambiguities, contradictions, and distortions that come with language.
And that’s why artificial barriers between subjects are so comforting, as it allows us to pretend that some parts of life are exact, and others are artistic, with a demarcation between them to keep everything nice and clear. What we consider scientific stays in its tidy box—stuck without any narrative trajectory. At the same time, what we consider artistic feels no pressure to confront the scientific. One notable exception to this dynamic might be architecture, as nearly everyone agrees that a quality result comes from both the refinement found in engineering and the beauty found in art. When this combination strikes just the right balance, you end up with the Sagrada FamÃlia in Barcelona, or the Parthenon in Athens, two structures that neither an engineer nor an artist could have build, if those were the sole qualifications. And—by a similar approach—if you want to explain the latest brain research, you must labor with the most difficult aspects of language, too, and deal with the complications of wispy, blurred descriptions, with the tricky aspects of articulating what’s indescribable, while trapped by the knowledge that both you and the reader give different nuances to every word. But if all of your scribbling, all of your lines, all of your searching for the precise word, is done right, you begin to approach that most human act of telling a story.