Better than the movie, why? What do pickpockets, fractals and engrams have to do with it? Two secret bonuses come with reading! We’ll explore memory engrams, fractals and mirror neurons along the way…
This is a (rough) transcript of

The book is pretty much always better than the movie. Well, I think so. Why would that be and what can we deduce from it? I have an idea why and think it leads to some pretty crazy awesome side effects.

I used to play a game on the Palm Pilot, I think it was called iLarn. It was a classic dungeon crawler.

This was way back in the day, so the interface was all just ascii characters: you were literally an “@” symbol.

The hell-hounds–they breathed fire!–were the letter “h”, dragons were a capital “D”, stuff like that. So you could qualify the UI as somewhat primitive.

Still, after playing for a little while, I have to tell you, when that big D popped onto the scene, your heart started pounding (yes, that is what she said). Playing the game, you managed to feel enthralled, completely submerged in the adventure, exploring, opening traps, avoiding monsters, killing skeletons, whatever it was. You were… IN THE GAAAME. This ability for symbolic cognition–mapping one thing to another by using that first thing as a representation for the latter–is somewhere humans really shine and seems to start around the age of 2.

I remember popping out of the game world, once, because part of me had noticed just how strongly–as in, physically–I’d reacted to some letter appearing on a little black and green screen. This got me thinking how, even though it was literally just a set of characters I was seeing, there was an actual adventure happening inside my mind.

I’m not saying it was a fully immersive 3D experience, now with smell-o-vision(tm). But I was taking in input from the world through my eyes, these random little squiggles, these lines on a display, and creating a universe, or enough of one to activate subsystems like fight-or-flight. I mean: that was the whole point and is what made it fun.

This is what happens, to an even greater extent perhaps, with books.

Now, I think there’s more to it… I didn’t read Dune for the longest time because I’d seen the movie–the old Lynch from ’84, with Sting strutting his stuff. It was pretty good, it was entertaining and visually appealing but truth is I mostly had no idea what the fuck was going on, beyond the obvious.

Three quarters of Dune, the story, is exposition, context or happening inside people’s heads. That’s a tad tricky to render on a screen and it’s only when I was finally convinced to read the thing that I realized just how much I’d missed and how good it was.

So that, and the fact the author has room to cover a lot, and that you can ingest it at your own pace… all these things probably play a part in making the book more gooder. But I think that the most important aspect is that, when you’re reading, you’re basically ingesting the parameters that allow you to reconstruct or to create a universe.

Now, some books go extra heavy on descriptions and stuff. You’ll spend three paragraphs talking about the curtains. I get bored pretty fast in those cases, because I’m pretty plot-driven. But at the same time, even in those wordy kinds of books, you just never have a description of every. single. thing.

Even if the author does take the time to describe the precise shape of her pretty little button nose, it’s partial and you only go over that once: you’re free to forget about it because it’s not in your face the whole time. So most everything that is “happening”, is actually being filled in by your by preconceptions, by wishes, by expectations… that is: by you.

In this regard, the adventure you’re living there is a collaboration between you and the author.

The author fills in those details they want to give you, to advance the story or set the mood, and you fill in… all the rest. And there’s nothing people like more than themselves and a world that meets their expectations.

Now, like with the game, that doesn’t mean you’re recreating an entire universe from quark to galaxy, or even the whole room. I think it’s a little bit like a dream.

Ever watch videos of pickpockets, or magicians, explaining their craft? If not, do it, it’s super cool–but the point is that these guys are masters of directing, or misdirecting, your attention, so they can do their dirty work where you aren’t looking.

We like to think pickpockets weaponize blind spots, and they do–they direct attention, exploiting sensory thresholds and leveraging psychology etc–but you can’t call it a blind spot if it’s the rule rather than the exception.

We filter out almost everything–there’s just too much–and actually see almost nothing, living our lives through the lens of a super tiny, super focused area of attention. Realize that we have maybe 200 degrees of field of view, but the fovea in your eye that gives you colorful perception that’s actually sharp, only covers about 2 degrees. Two!

Outside of that, acuity nosedives quickly into blurry motion detection and little else, so your impression of seeing what’s around is just all made up.

That’s also my theory about dream worlds: there’s no generated universe your consciousness is walking around in, your mind just fills in the blanks, the dream generator is concentrated on creating that little bit you’re focused on and it just lets the observer part of you assume the rest is as you’d expect, just like you do, all day every day, your entire waking life.

And it’s also my theory about what’s happening when reading–everything that isn’t stated explicitly, and even some bits that were–you just invent as you’d prefer it to be, as you would assume it to be, as you have decided it would be.

This is all a background process that you don’t even notice. The point is that bits of the story can be well-told, and interesting, and titillating, which is great, but every other bit you might care to consider is left up to you, and so is custom-made for you, by you.

Feels to me like we do this all the time and it’s why I don’t think I’d have much success in online dating.

First off, there’s the fact that my personal book cover, by which I am definitely judged, probably isn’t a great representation of what’s inside.

More importantly, to me, is that 90% of the stuff animal me is expecting when interacting with another human–body language, smells and pheromones, tone of voice, tics and mannerisms–all the million little signals we evolved to detect and interpret–they’re just M.I.A. and I have the sneaking suspicion that, without even realizing it, some part of the brain would be trying to infer them from way too little data or just outright inventing them, according to my hopes or at least expectations.

That there is a recipe for: disappointment.

The longer you puts around online, the more your brain will have time to wonder about, then generate the missing bits according to taste, and that’s not going to work out great.

I think that actually implies that, if you’re a player with no concerns about anything more than a single meet, your best bet is to provide the least amount of information possible on those apps. That’s probably a testable hypothesis, I just don’t care enough.

The point is that reading is a mix of being surprised by the author, just enough to be entertained without getting lost, so a mix of author content and making stuff up yourself, just the way you’d like it to be.

Now there are two things with this. First is that the movie can never do that.

If you had imagined the hero looking like so, being this kind of person, moving this way, as you fill in all the blanks with your preferences well, the movie’s not going to be able to deliver that. The film has to make some choices: this is the actor and this is her face. Out of the immense possibility space, it’s pretty unlikely to be a match to the–perfect by definition–selection of your own mind.

And if happens to be just exactly 100% what you’d imagined, well, then good on you, but you’re the only 100% satisfied customer, this one time. What I’m saying just applies to everyone else.

All parties involved in making the movie, casting, set design, etc are making choices that would have otherwise been left up to you and therefore perfectly customized to you.

So that’s why the book is always better than the movie because everybody who reads a book is having a somewhat different experience that is 100% customized to theirs biases and preferences.

The real point of all this is that your involvement in co-creating this universe, this adventure tale, this sequence, makes it really easy to accept, more likely to be “let it in” without resistance and a more pleasurable experience.

Great, reading is so fun. yay!

But, if this is true, there are two hidden bonuses in here.

While you’re reading you are working, as in actively engaged in creating the scenes and sequence of events.

Paying attention, vividly imagining and even feeling emotional involvement will all make the journey more interesting but they’ll also impact how deeply and precisely you remember those events. And memories sure are an interesting thing.

Memories are actually stored, i.e. encoded, in your brain somewhere somehow. Just how isn’t all that clear, but I lean towards the idea that they’re stored holographically, in the sense of distributed, something that was hinted at a long while ago, though by experiments on rats ’cause you can’t take out chunks of people’s brains and see if they forgot how to play the Aqualung.

The holographic encoding makes sense to me in that it’s better if damage, say from a mini stroke, causes a loss of resolution rather than a literal piece of memory going away.

Well, that line of reasoning may be BS since I don’t think people are getting TIAs before reproductive age, and only those things that happen before you pass on the germ-line have a heavy impact on fitness. Maybe some proto-form of life was more susceptible to brain damage, whatever … because how would you do it otherwise? It’s not like we can write an MP4 file a byte at a time to some sort of block RAM, I don’t think that’s how neural nets behave. I dunno, a topic for another day.

Something we can be pretty certain of is that with episodic memories, the engrams are NOT a series of frames with 4k pixels at 30 fps.

It’s more like sort of outline, with highlights and salient bits covering all the things you found most important, and paid most attention to.

That would mean that memories are more a process of interpretation and reconstruction than they are in any way photographic and this is part of what makes them super plastic. When retrieved, the network containing the memory is reactivated and the memory is in a state of reconsolidation, where it’s kind of fragile and subject to modification before it’s re-written back to storage.

We think like this because interference can be used in things like extinction training in therapy, where they progressively blunt the hit of traumatic memories with PTSD patients, by surfacing the memory and working on it repeatedly before it goes back to storage.

Then there’s drugs like propranolol that can weaken memories or at least their emotional impact, and surely other stuff I don’t know about.

The converse of that is false memory injection–for this, look up Elizabeth Loftus.

The neat thing with experiments like the lost-in-the-mall study, is that not only did simple interviews that blended facts with suggestive BS manage to get 25% of people to spontaneously generate a false memory about themselves, some people, over time, actually went ahead and added really specific vivid bits to the false memory, like how the mall smelled.

Combined with stuff like the work of Schacter on suggestibility, you start realizing just how fragile, and really mostly made up, our memories are.

So, with all this, how is it that you can tell the difference between something that really happened to you and something you just imagined?

Short version is: I dunno.

The longer version is that our brains use some sort of source monitoring to track where memories come from, and there’s a feel and depth to the contextual details of a real memory versus the polished experience from a story.

And we surely use logic to track whether something fits in with our timeline: “remember that time we were living as pure consciousness uploads to the Dyson sphere around Proxima Centauri?”

Yeah, that’s probably not mine.

But the truth is that it can all get fuzzy and the false memory stuff shows that the blurriness can actually become sharp, even if it never actually happened.

Ok, you say, that’s weird, so reading a story might be more pleasing but it has a greater chance of looking like a false memory? How is that a good thing?

I once saw something about downhill skiers, training for the Olympics. These guys would do the all things you would expect, strength training, working on techniques and all that. But the Olympics were far away and access to the mountain wasn’t a thing, but they did know what the course would be, precisely.

So part of the training was mental. It was visualization, going moment by moment, in their mind, through every single thing that would come up, from starting point to the end of the course.

Though not as strong as when performing or even watching an action, vivid visualisation triggers activity in the premotor cortex and mirror neurons, with tweaks to readiness potential and micro-level activity in related muscles, and that’s even detectable by electromyography.

This kind of training doesn’t make you physically stronger but it sharpens coordination, affects reaction time, and is good for mental edge.

The point is: though it only happens in their brain, it’s still PRACTICE

I’m a big fan of practice

So that’s bonus 1: you are practicing–yeah ok not much, but I think your involvement in visualizing the events in a book make it more practice than just passively consuming media.

So, are you practicing piloting spaceships? Eeeehh… I dunno.

One thing I can guarantee is that you are stretching your theory of mind. This is your ability to understand or predict what’s going on in other peoples heads.

And this goes beyond basic empathy to recursive, or higher-order, Theory of mind.

So you’re growing the number of hops you can hold in your head about knowledge or ignorance in complex networks, like “he knows that she doesn’t know that Robert thinks she stole his shoes”

This kind of practice increases ability, according to studies by Kidd and Castano and others, for people who’ve ingested a lot of literary fiction.

This probably works for watching game of thrones, too, but my guess is that the stuff we’ve talked about before makes it stickier and more impactful with books.

And don’t discount those piloting skills too quickly.

I’m not saying you’ll get mastery of skip drives just from reading some space opera, but you do build up your set of “what if” scenarios and at least a few studies showed fiction readers were better at brainstorming solutions to emergencies, better at pivoting in workplace simulations
and more adaptable.

After “living” a thousand crises, real surprises are just less alien. That’s pretty cool.

Now I said “living”, with air quotes there, but here’s where I think bonus number 2 comes in.

If you’ve made it this far, then I am certain you’re the kind of person who knows what a fractal is.

Fractals are funny beasts–sure, it’s trippy to zoom into a Mandelbrot set and you can get lost exploring these fascinating things–but what I want to underscore here is their dimensionality.

How many dimensions something has is just a question of how many coordinates you need to specify a single point on it.

It’s obvious that a spot on a earth needs 3 coordinates, like lat, lon and altitude for GPS. But I said ball rather than sphere here, because a sphere has some fixed radius so, while embedded in 3-space, is a 2-dimensional surface.

To clarify this, which I think causes some confusion, lets take a straight line.

Though it’s in a 2D plane, is only one dimensional, since it’s defined as y = mx + b, so all I need is to give you is x (or y) and you’ve got everything you need to know to select some unique point. This is also true of circles, which may starts getting a bit counter intuitive, but since once it’s defined (meaning it has a certain specific radius) all I need to give you is the angle–one parameter–to find where I’m talking about.

Anyway fractals are made out of lines or surfaces, but thanks the infinities lurking within number systems, these things get weird–like Sierpiński triangle, where you take a triangle and cut out smaller and smaller triangles, ad infinitum. That geometry has infinite perimeter but an area of … ZERO.

The reason I’m talking about it here is that it’s calculated dimensionality is somewhere between that of a line and a surface, calculated as something like 1.5 dimensions.

So any curve you can draw on a piece of paper–meaning some shape embedded in a 2D space–will always have a dimensionality somewhere between 1 and the maximum supported by the plane, which is 2.

I find this notion of Hausdorff/fractal dimensionality pretty fascinating, because what it’s saying to me is that by increasing the complexity–“space filling” wigglyness of a line, you are in some way increasing it’s … depth, like it’s weight or presence.

Won’t ever be enough to escape flat-land into 3-space, but it still counts.

To get where I was going with this tangent, my notion–and this is nothing more than a gut feeling–is that as you pile on vicarious experience by reading fiction, as you add more and more to the pile of simulated past adventures, and unexpected novel situations you’ve virtually faced and deeply embedded by co-creating them while reading.

You are actually adding folds and wiggliness to your mind and to your life.

You only have one life to live, but my theory is that going through hundreds of alternate timelines and side quests and perspectives, you are adding fractional dimensionality, and are living, at least a bit more, than that one life.

Therefore, my recommendation is yes, perfect your craft, hone your skills, read about the professional things, scientific things, but also dedicate regular time to fiction that you find interesting.

In my case, that’s specifically science fiction–I think it allows for as much play with the human side of the equation as other types of stories, but also gives much wider range in terms of context and exploration of ideas.

But that’s me, I was born at a great time but often feel it was just a bit too early.

Whatever your preference, choose knowing it will impact who you become and have a bunch of fun, while stretching your mind and the depth and breadth of your life as a happy side effect.