A Johns Hopkins University research team is asking for the public’s help in mapping the specific areas of the brain that kick into high gear when we read a novel or buy movie tickets.
From left Iris Lee, incoming Johns Hopkins University graduate student, Janice Chen, professor of psychological and brain sciences, and Sammy Tavassoli, PhD student, are running a short story contest, the fiction Made to Read and Investigate Writing Prize. The name plays on functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which they will use to research the relationship between memory and brain imaging.
“If you think about it, your life is made up of a series of events. And each one of those events is a story,” she said. Chen thought members of the public might enjoy helping to design her team’s research studies. How often does the average Baltimorean get a chance to don an imaginary white lab coat, to become Doctor You?
Two winners — one aged 14 to 18, and one adult — will be selected to receive a $500 prize based on standard literary criteria as well as whether their work contains attributes useful to the researchers. Iris Lee, who has worked in Chen’s lab and who will begin graduate school in creative writing this fall, said that because the material collected in the contest will be used for a variety of studies, researchers aren’t looking for any particular type of story. A whodunit is as likely to win as a historical romance.
“If you don’t have a memory, you don’t the ability to go from one moment to the next and predict what’s going to happen,” Chen said. “You can’t connect cause and effect. Memory is essential to being a person.”“There’s decades-old studies that show that if you just give people a list of random words to read and then ask them to recall it, they’re not very good at it,” Chen said.
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