Embracing Uncertainty: How Literary Writing Can Change Your Mind

Creative writing and cognitive neuroscience reveal how literary writing changes our minds by enhancing our tolerance for uncertainty. My Meaning Spiral Model shows how literary writing hijacks the mechanisms of day-to-day perception to promote vividness of experience and insight. My novel, The Generosity of Darkness, enacts and embodies the principles of the model. Literary writing makes use of devices of concreteness, uncertainty, and wider perspective. These devices enable two shifts: The first is a shift from knowing cognition (top-down) to animate cognition (bottom-up sensing). Literary devices of concreteness, such as detailed sensory description, invite animate cognition. Devices of uncertainty, such as novel metaphor, contradiction, and indeterminacy, stymie habitual assumptions and invite bottom-up sensing and a wider way of attending to detect contextual clues or more remote associations for resolving meaning. The second shift is from centralised cognition to what I term Ensemble Cognition. During ensemble cognition, meaning and insight emerge through a process of mutual co-ordination between networked sub-systems (modules). Centralised cognition is analogous to an orchestra being led by a conductor, whereas ensemble cognition functions like an ensemble of improvising jazz musicians. Ensemble Cognition is facilitated by the devices associated with the shift from knowing to animate cognition and also by devices of wider perspective, such as breaking the fourth wall and the inherent detachment of a reader or beholder who is experiencing an artwork rather than real life. Devices of wider perspective promote an open awareness and a wider perspective which brings freedom (free-view) from entrained assumptions and personal, narrow perspective (me-view). I relate these benefits of sensory experiencing and wider perspective to therapeutic approaches and mindfulness and conclude that literary writing changes our minds by shifting our cognition from knowing to animate and towards a more ensemble way of processing that is grounded in a wider perspective.