Author gets wired while writing, for the cause of science

Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg has been literally wired recently as he writes his latest novella in his small apartment in Midtown Manhattan.

This is his most recent of a dozen books that have promoted him to one of the most celebrated novelists in his country.

He wears a piece of headgear, while he’s writing this novella, with 28 electrodes to monitor his heart rate, brain waves, galvanic skin response (a measure of emotional arousal) and his facial expressions.

Come next autumn, when the book is published, there will be 50 Dutch volunteers who will read the book under similar monitored circumstances.

The data will be used to see if there is any link in the way the book is written and the way it is read.

Ysbrand van der Werf, researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and the VU Medical Center in Amsterdam said: “Will readers of Arnon’s text feel they understand or embody the same emotions he had while writing it, or is reading a completely different process?” Ysbrand designed the experiment with Jan van Erp from the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research.

This experiment is part of the field of neuroaesthetics, which has been trying to identify what underpins our experience of music and art, and is now turning its attention to reading.

Mr Grunberg said of the headgear: “After about a half-hour, your head starts to hurt.”

He’s also getting a bit spooked by the process. “I find myself having all these fantasies,” he said, “like that I was part of an experiment supposedly looking at my brain while I was writing, but the real point was something else entirely.”

Good plot for a novel!

Girl Spots McDonald's Errors

A ten-year-old aspiring writer was astonished to find errors on a poster while enjoying a meal at McDonald’s with her family.

Emily Cox read the poster which advertises face painting sessions for children. The first error which she spotted was a superfluous apostrophe in the word Saturdays. She then realised that there was an apostrophe missing from “children’s holidays”, and noticed various other mistakes.

The budding proofreader commented: “I was quite surprised because they are a big company and there were a lot of mistakes. I like to read stories and would like to be an author when I’m older but I haven’t made up my mind completely yet.”

Emily’s mother Angela expressed her surprise that a company such as McDonald’s had made such mistakes on a corporate poster. She said that she and Emily had enjoyed “a very interesting and funny conversation” after the clever girl had explained why the poster was incorrect.

A spokesman for McDonald’s confirmed that the company would be withdrawing the poster and that it would be sending Emily books as a reward for her grammatical astuteness.

She said: “We apologise for the grammatical errors on one of our posters and congratulate the clever, eagle-eyed girl who spotted them.”