Click on NOTE CATEGORIES to browse by topic, read through the entire archives, or type a topic in the search box.Biomechanist Katy Bowman and biologist Jeannette Loram talk with English professor Vybarr Cregan-Reid about books and the body.
Katy, Jeannette, and Vybarr discuss being ‘rescued’ by books, the value of fiction in developing empathy, reading as a workout for the brain, how literacy may have changed our brain, and the current denigration of fiction within education. They debate ideas about the evolution of storytelling and its role within different cultures, whether reading is a high-tech version of storytelling, and how oral story differs from written story. They also touch on how writing and reading can be hard on the body and offer some personal tips for offsetting long hours of writing.
OVERVIEW
(time codes are approximate)
00:03:30 - Introducing Vybarr (Jump to section)
00:13:15 - Story as Anatomy and Changing Our Brain (Jump to section)
00:23:25 - Long Form, Short Form, and Tweets (Jump to section)
00:27:30 - Reading, Skimming, and Sub-Vocalizing (Jump to section)
00:32:45 - Rescued By Books (Jump to section)
00:49:30 - Staying Healthy While Writing (and Reading) Books (Jump to section)
00:54:30 - Favorite Book Recommendations (Jump to section)
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW
Vybarr's BBC Series: Changing World, Changing Bodies
We Are What We Read: A life Within and Without Books
Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us - US link
Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us - UK link
Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human - US link
Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human - UK link
Stanford study on the brain reading Jane Austen
Distraction by Natalie Phillips
Joseph Henrich - The Weirdest People in the World
Books Katy, Jeannette, and Vybarr recommend
Richard Powers - The Overstory
David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks
Maria Doria Russell - The Sparrow
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
(Theme Music)
This is the Move Your DNA podcast, a show where movement science meets your everyday life. I'm Katy Bowman, Biomechanist, author, and avid reader. And I'm Jeannette Loram, biologist, movement teacher, and fellow bookworm. Every body is welcome here. Let's get started.
(Music fade)
KATY: Jeannette, are you ready?
JEANNETTE: I'm ready.
KATY: Ok. Today's show is about books. I love books. You love books. Is that true?
JEANNETTE: That's totally true. I love nothing more than running a bath, sitting in the bath with a book, and wallowing away a couple of hours.
KATY: Yes. You take a bath for a couple of hours?
JEANNETTE: No. I wish.
KATY: Yeah. So great.
JEANNETTE: I wish. Would be pretty cold by then too.
KATY: Well and there's a place here in the very rural place where I live. And someone has started we'll call it a "spa" (air quotes spa). It's in the forest. And one of the things you can do there - it's just a very small, rural home business - is take an outside bath in the forest.
JEANNETTE: Amazing.
KATY: It's all woodfire. It's all off-grid. And you can go into this hot bath full of herbs: cedar, mugwort, lavender that she's harvested and she's filled this bath. And there's also a cold plunge trough to the other side. And I take my book.
JEANNETTE: Oh my goodness.
KATY: It's just - can you imagine?
JEANNETTE: That just sounds heaven.
KATY: It's heaven.
JEANNETTE: Absolutely heaven.
KATY: And it's just reading in the bath but I had to drive away from - to leave all my family and work behind and just take an hour bath. I mean it's forest bathing. It's literal forest bathing.
JEANNETTE: That's amazing.
KATY: It's not Shinrin-yoku. Or it's not only Shinrin-yoku because you're actually immersed in this bath. I'll send you a photo.
JEANNETTE: Just to make me feel jealous. Amazing.
KATY: Or more just amazed.
JEANNETTE: I will be amazed.
KATY: Amazing.
JEANNETTE: I'm thinking about it here in the summer with the midges it probably wouldn't work. A winter thing, maybe.
KATY: The midges. Yeah. It's a big drawback. I mean there's a lot of beautiful. I will still come and walk all over your...
JEANNETTE: As long as you're walking you're fine.
KATY: Yeah.
JEANNETTE: But then my husband and I were saying that's why it's quiet. That's why it's...
KATY: Tradeoffs!
KATY: So today we're going to talk about reading. We're going to talk about books: specifically are books hard on the body? Are books good for the body? What's the relationship? How are we interacting physically with books? With reading.
JEANNETTE: And we have someone. A very special guest today who is joining us. Welcome to Vybarr Cregan Reid. Vybarr is a professor of creative non-fiction at York St. John University in the U.K. He is also the author of three non-fiction books. Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human. Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us. And his latest book that launches today is We Are What We Read.
(Theme music)
KATY: Welcome Vybarr to Move Your DNA. Let's talk about books. Ok, let's jump in. I have so many questions about books and the body and Vybarr, I feel like ... Jeannette and I were talking. We both noticed your new book on Social Media about books. And I know that you've also written other books that really adopt a bit of an Evolutionary biology perspective as well. So I thought this is the perfect person to have this conversation with. I have got some burning questions and Jeannette, you're also someone I would love to have this conversation with so let's jump in. Your new book is We Are What We Read. I once had a nutrition professor who had a personalized license plate that was "U R WHT U 8". And she thought it was more correct. You're not really what you eat, you're what you ate. She thought it was a superior version. So your title can be read in two ways. We Are What We Read or We Are What We Read (past tense).
VYBARR: Oh yeah!
KATY: What do you think about the title and why?
VYBARR: Yeah well I think I'm liking your version actually. The past tense. We are what we read. That's so clever, isn't it? Because we are what we ate. And we're also what we did. We're also what we did. I mean it's supposed to be We Are What We Read. I never successfully choose the titles of my books. Every single book that I've gone to publisher with started, "Yeah, yeah that's a great idea. No, you can't have that."
KATY: So what was the working title in your mind for the book?
VYBARR: Well my working title was Reading Matters. And I liked the idea that it played on - it was about reading materials but actually, it was about things to do with reading: various reading matters and also Reading Matters! (exclamation mark). But the publisher said "No you can't" because it needs to be clearer. So they said what about "We are What We Read" and I just said "Yeah". I love that. I love that. And it does - it's not just kind of like a snappy title. It does kind of make sense in the context of the arguments I'm mounting about things like - well fiction actually. My other book, Primate Change - that was originally called The Anthropocene Body. And the publisher said "No Way."
KATY: Yeah no. I'm gonna go with Primate Change. But as someone who wrote a book, Alignment Matters and Movement Matters, I'm actually a fan of Reading Matters. I would have picked that up in an instant.
YVBARR: All the folders on my computer to do with the book are all called Reading Matters.
KATY: Yes. I know how that goes. Great. Well, your book is really about story. You talk about the importance of story. You have this one section, there's just a paragraph really, that was talking about the importance of story, especially for children in becoming I'll just say more empathetic. Being able to put themselves in another person's shoes. And you had also mentioned in that same section that for those who didn't read, or for those who read non-fiction, they were missing out on the benefit of story. So, of course, my spine straightened just a little bit. Because I love non-fiction. And for me, I feel like non-fiction operates in a similar way of putting yourself in the shoes of the person who is gathering all this information and giving you yes maybe something that's supposed to be unbiased but is never really unbiased. It's always through their filter. So I would like to hear a little bit about how you see the definition of story as separate from the definition of book. And why story would not include non-fiction.
VYBARR: So those statements actually come from a trial that was testing something called theory of mind. Which is our ability to understand the existence of other people's thoughts and that people might have survived deals or beliefs that are contrary to us or may want different things to us. The Theory of Mind - especially empathy. And within those trials, I think their understanding of non-fiction was like the kinds of non-fiction that you write, Katy. The kinds of non-fiction that I've written in the past where it's - you're covering kind of factual material and presenting an interpretation of that material and then also maybe turning that interpretation into something that people can adopt in their lives. And although story plays a role in that, I think it's quite different to something that, say, fiction does. And it's also important to say that all non-fiction is not the same. A great deal of non-fiction is story-based. There's a wonderful memoir by a woman called Tara Westover called "Educated" and it's about her upbringing in the U.S. and how she got well not away from her family but got after her family into more formal education. And that absolutely is story. So I think in that context that kind of non-fiction would actually count as story. Would actually count - it would go into the "fiction" story account. The reason that fiction is very good in terms of developing Theory of Mind, is because from the moment someone says "Once upon a time", it's as if they've taken the camera and you're now looking through it. And they're now showing you someone else's life. Someone else's existence. Someone else's needs. Someone else's wants. And you're being made to understand that life within the context of the story. So, who was it? I can't remember who it was - a famous person who said - Instead of ... the people that read non-fiction and using this term in a quite constricted way to mean factual stuff, that people who read non-fiction they only ever get to live one life. Where the people who read fiction get to live thousands. And it's also the reason, I think, why story, novel, a work of fiction, can really take it out of you. There's been studies done by neuroscientists that describe the effect of reading fiction as being like a workout for the brain.So, not only are lots of different parts of the brain firing and activating during fiction. But something else is happening which is called the creating of mirror neurons where as we read a word - a verb like taste, touch, kick, punch. You know if you're reading a thriller and there's lots of action in it, your brain responds as if your body is actually performing some of those actions. It doesn't respond in exactly the same way, but it kind of performs shadows of those. So it's almost as if our motor cortex is being fired up in the same way as if we're actually doing the movements themselves. And for me, personally, this goes on to a much bigger question about whether or not fiction is real. Because I think fiction is - it's definitely happening in the States. It's certainly happening in Southeast Asia and in India and it's definitely happening in the U.K. where fiction and the study of things like English Literature is being not exactly written off but it's being denigrated as something that's made up. It's not real. It's something that people do in their spare time. Whereas I think what lots of these debates are showing us is that not only does fiction have neurological effects on us, but we just need to look out into the streets or someone will mention something like Big Brother, and we talk to each other by using metaphors from fiction. If we were to talk about Big Brother or Harry Potter we all know what those things are. We absolutely know what those things are. So how is that not real? Obviously Harry Potter is not real. But that thing that we're all talking about, that is very very real. That's very very real. Warner Brothers certainly feel like the profits from Harry Potter are very very real. So one of things we're trying to do in the book, We Are What We Read is making that point that when we read something it does become a part of us. I mean the story will stay with us. But even at a neurological level, books are becoming a part of us. They leave a lasting effect. So we really are what we have read, what we read.
VYBARR: It's like become part of our gaze.
KATY: Yes. Reading as a skill set is also changing the brain. And that was one of the things I wanted to talk to both you and Jeannette about. Where there's evidence that being literate is changing the brain. It's changing the way we use our brain. And I first read about this in Joseph Henrich's book: The Weirdest People in the World. Weird is an acronym for Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic. So basically saying that literate humans are an outlier to humanity as a whole. And some of the byproduct of literacy is they go through different changes in the brain. And they've been researched to see what exactly they are. And it's still ongoing. But that there's a way of then perceiving other people doing things like face recognition. And then also the way you end up thinking. The way you tend to think in terms of, interestingly enough, the way I would think someone who read a lot of non-fiction would be highly analytical.
VYBARR: Very well informed.
KATY: Obviously very well informed but less tendency towards holistic perspective in general. And so I've always been really interested in, I read a lot of eco-psychology and indigenous perspective and that's always a big difference. It's like why would you have in, you know, similar humans but with completely different cultures where literacy was a different aspect of it, have different ways of perceiving the world? This is why I want to distinguish between books and story. Because I feel like, well here's an analogy that maybe you can comment on. Oral story is to story in books as barefoot walking or running is to conventionally shod walking or running. What do you think?
VYBARR: I think I need a little bit more explanation. So oral story is to book as barefoot running is to shod running.
KATY: This was like an SAT test that you didn't know you were showing up for. Well, so I would say that, or I would ask - I'm curious. Is story in book format a high-tech version oral story. Because of the medium.
VYBARR: Yeah. I mean I think it is. Literacy ... we've only really run in comfy shoes for about the last 50 years, so if we just break that down a bit and extend it, we've really only been reading for, what? Something like, what is it, 5,000 years? Yeah, it's been about 4-5000 years. Accountants invented writing, bless them. We have that to thank from them. But poetry's been around for at least 3 or 4000 years and I think poetry, before Homer, there was the Epic of Gilgamesh that was about 3000, 3 and a half thousand years old. And that became the first book. Each page of the Epic of Gilgamesh was about this big. A piece of clay that was wet and was pressed with a reed and then it was baked. So that meant it lasted thousands of years. So I think that's the kind of earliest transition that we can see from oracy to literacy. And that's the problem - we have no record. That's when history begins. History didn't exist until the point that somebody starts to write it down.
KATY: The definition.
VYBARR: That's what history is. Yeah. Before that, it's just our past. I mean, I'd love to know how stories circulated before the book. The book has certainly enabled stories to become much longer and much more complex. But then if you read something like the Illiad or The Oddessy which were oral stories, you can't imagine something more detailed and complex. Again, we don't know exactly who wrote them down or at what point they were written down or in what form they were written down. I think it's fairly safe to assert that literacy is not natural. And the very fact that neuroscientists and neuropsychologists are still not quite sure what happens. They can see what parts of the brain that are activated when we read and they can also see - it's a rather awkward example to use - but sadly lots of what's been discovered about the way that people read is when people have had brain injuries.
KATY: Right.
VYBARR: So they can find out which paths to the brain are used or activated. And sometimes it's been a total mystery as to why the brain is being used. But reading is not natural. We have the FOXp2 gene that allows us to do all of these funny verbal acrobatics that ends up as speech. So speech and language are kind of natural, but books are not. In the same way as shoes are not natural. So I think books are now longer and more complex. But I think that they're just as essential to our as any story or myth ever was. I think storytelling is the absolute core of power being, in a vast sense, making impulse when we are presented with the world.
JEANNETTE: I really think that you've hit the nail on the head right there. Is that human beings … we are this driven to communicate and interact with each other through whatever means we can. I have some thoughts on language and the FOXp2 gene as well. Because I think we. FOXp2 is a complicated - I'm not going to go into it - but it's a complicated gene. It codes to many things, not just language. And...
VYBARR: What other things does it code for? Do you know?
JEANNETTE: Well it's the kind of, I think it's a modifier so the protein that it codes for - actually modifies other expression of genes. So it's actually expressed in lung tissue and it has all sorts of different functions. Which is very common that something, a gene code for protein that does many things. I think it's become known as a language gene because of its appearance in speech pathology. But, you need many more things to be able to speak and read and whatever. But I'm quite interested in this language instinct idea. I don't know if you've read much about it but there was a theory that we had an innate instinct, like a language instinct or a machinery - some biologically determined machinery to bring about language. And it doesn't appear to be that is the case. Which is ...
KATY: I love your face. Vybarr's face. It's like, "WHAT?"
JEANNETTE: I think we think it's innate because every single population on the planet speaks.
VYBARR: Most mammals.
JEANNETTE: Sign language.
VYBARR: They all communicate.
JEANNETTE: Yes, there are some instincts, like a baby's cry would be an instinct. Because one of the first things it does to - it's like it's an imperative that it needs to make noise. But that's different from language.
VYBARR: Yeah.
JEANNETTE: So there was this idea that there was a universal grammar and that that was encoded in our genetics. And it's pretty much been debunked, I think.
VYBARR: It sounds very debunkable.
JEANNETTE: Yes. So although it wasn't for ages. Because it seems so appealing, I think. So I was wondering: Is reading really not natural or is it , we are a fundamentally cooperative species. You wouldn't believe that to look at the news. But we evolved to cooperate in small tribes and groups. Our success was due to the fact that we were a cooperative species. So there's this drive to communicate and influence each other. And so speech and interaction - that to me would be the impulse. So maybe reading is just we needed the tools to do it gut the impulse to communicate and influence is what's kind of the fundamental thing.
VYBARR: When really books, writing starts with the impulse to keep a record of who owes you money.
JEANNETTE: Ok. Yeah. That's a good point.
KATY: We could fit more into the current events narrative.
JEANNETTE: Ok. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's not that competition. It's actually just about stuff. Just about money.
KATY: The one thing I appreciated about your book is I'm a big reader. And because I like slow, long formats, I want to understand someone's perspective. I want to understand the nuance, the complication. And I've found that there is a directional change towards the written word and it going into what I consider short form. It started with articles. I mean, there's always been newspaper articles. But then the amount of short-form... and then it goes to tweets, you know, or captions of a photo. And that's where many people are gathering their story as well as their nonfiction version of story: their information overall. You mentioned earlier this step away from English - the study of English. Do you think that there's a perception that it's just a cumbersome - in biology, it's just vestigial? It's no longer necessary. And so, therefore, why keep this archaic heritage pursuit alive? Let's stay with the times and go to skimmable words.
VYBARR: Yeah, I mean, well, one of the reasons I wrote the book was because there are so many answers to that question. Some of them are local to the UK and some of them are quite specific to teaching tertiary level education. But there are there are so many answers to that question. Recently the things that have probably irked me the most would be kind of Silicon Valley interventions that would say, "if you get this app you don't have to read this book. You can just we'll give you a 15-minute synopsis. We'll pick out the key ideas". And that's fine, isn't it? That's fine. But it's never ever ever going to be the same thing. I think as soon as when someone tells me that you can put 500 books on a Kindle - I mean I love technology don't get me wrong. I'm talking on a brand-new iPad. But when I read on a Kindle I'm not really reading. I'm doing something slightly different. And I don't think I'm an old curmudgeon. I might be. I don't think I am. But when I went on holiday recently the book that I wanted to read was a 650-page hardback which weighed probably nearly two kilos. And I had to carry that. And I probably shouldn't swear but I would swear normally. I had to carry that thing around with me in my backpack, pulling down my shoulder. But I would still rather do that than have something that wasn't a codex. Because they're phenomenological experiences. It's an an experience to touch a book, to feel a book, to as you're reading it feel the weight shift from your right hand to your left as you make your way through it. The smell of it. The fact that if I read a thousand-page book and you said "Oh and there's that bit where such and such says such and such", I would be able to say "Well I can't remember where that is but I do remember that it was about four lines down from the page and I would be able to find it.
KATY: Yeah.
VYBARR: And that's never going to happen. So there are sensual aspects to reading that you can't put in a synopsis. So there are non-fiction books I'm not all that interested in spending eight or ten hours of my time on. And I would be interested in reading a synopsis of. But it's a mistake to think that's reading. It's something else. Unless you have a book in your hand, and you're doing something else.
VYBARR: How quickly do you read, Jeanette? Do you mind me asking?
JEANNETTE: You know, I have no idea. It's just fast in comparison to him, I think. He says, "Do you skim?" And I'm like, "Oh, maybe I skim."
VYBARR: Good readers skim.
JEANNETTE: But that's why I, when I was thinking about this, and I actually started to do some reading around it about attention, and Katy had brought up this idea of attention. And I found some fascinating research from a group in the U.S. that have been looking actually at people reading Jane Austen.
VYBARR: Where? Which group?
JEANNETTE: It was Stanford. Natalie Phillips?
VYBARR: Right. Okay. No, I don't know it. Is fascinating from an evolutionary perspective.
JEANNETTE: Yeah I don't know. Her perspective might not be. She's written a book called Distraction, which I thought was quite interesting. Anyway.
VYBARR: I'm going to make a note.
JEANNETTE: And it's all about the Enlightenment era. I know you're interested in that kind of…
VYBARR: That floats my boat.
JEANNETTE: ..that floats your boat. Yeah. But they'd looked at people reading Jane Austen and they took PhD candidates, literary candidates. So they were people used to reading in a very deep way. And they asked them to alternate between kind of pleasure, skim reading, and deep, critical-thinking reading. And they found that the effect on the brain was really different. So different parts of the brain lit up. And it seemed like it was reading and deeply thinking about what you were reading that kind of really gave your brain a workout. And they talked about this idea of cognitive flexibility. That this kind of reading, and you probably know more about this than me, but cognitive flexibility is this idea you can read something that's in your sphere of excellence, but you can kind of pick other things from other areas that you've read about and kind of bring them to the attention. So that was kind of interesting for me. Reading is not reading is not reading. Ever. And we can have different anatomical and biochemical effects on the brain, depending on how we read. And I think that's something that I read more deeply with nonfiction, I think, because I'm often trying to deeply understand something. So I will...whereas often for me...I love novels. And if I find a particularly beautiful passage, I will reread it but often when it's a gripping story I'm chugging through it. So it's just different.
VYBARR: I've never really thought about that before, about different modes of reading. But of course, what you're saying is absolutely obvious. That a kind of very particular attentive reading would of course light up different parts of the of the brain. That's very very interesting. I want to ask you if you sub-vocalize when you're reading and you know all this sort of stuff.
JEANNETTE: Mumble away. Yeah. All the time.
VYBARR: You do okay. And you're still able to go fast? Because you can really pick up the pace if you don't sub-vocalize. If you don't say the words in your head...
JEANNETTE: So, sorry can you clarify sub-vocal means you don't say it out loud?
VYBARR: You don't say it but you're saying you're saying them in your head
JEANNETTE: Oh yeah no, I don't often do that.
VYBARR: Yeah. So if you're saying them in your head you're probably reading about 250 words a minute and then once you stop sub-vocalizing you can go almost as fast as you want. I can't go much faster actually it turns out.
JEANNETTE: But now you've made me want to time myself.
VYBARR: It's worth knowing but I think also good readers have got lots of gears. Like, we don't need the description of the palisades. You know. We can just kind of be moving on. Good readers are good at changing gears. I also think there are different kinds of fictions. So, don't get me wrong, I absolutely love a page-turner. And I do read in those modes for sure. Some people love thrillers - a story that kind of drives you onwards. Others prefer fiction that forces you to confront things or to ask questions about yourself. And so I would have thought if you were reading something like, I'm trying not to sound like an idiot now, if you were reading something like Tolstoy, what you would find is that you would probably more naturally slip into those, or actually Jane Austen, slip into those more reflective modes of critical and careful reading. The other thing is, for me, most of reading doesn't happen while I'm doing it. It usually happens afterward, when I'm thinking about it. Or even better, when I start talking about it. Because I often don't really know what I think about things until I start talking about them. But until they kind of sit with you for a little while, it takes some time for them to come to life. So, yeah, I think there are loads of different kinds of and different modes of reading. I've looked up Natalie Phillips' Distraction, Problems of Attention in 18th Century Literature. It sounds great!
JEANNETTE: There you go. I thought that would appeal.
KATY: In your book, you use a phrase, rescued by books. I really like that. I can relate to that because books for me were a way of calming my nervous system. I realize now, I mean, I was a voracious reader, really to the extent that I didn't do much else when I was younger. But it was a way for me to stay calm. It was a way for me, I realize now, to, in a way that someone might use, scrolling on a screen. It was a way to calm myself. So I too was saved by books. Now we're in an environment where there's more than books available for people to soothe themselves. And I'm going to read a section from your book: Stories are so potent, some even call them a technology invented by humans not to teach us how to make a fire or build a skyscraper, but how to deal with loss, how to understand others, how to forge connections, how to be. And that section made me think of Anna Lemke, who wrote Dopamine Nation. She's a psychiatrist and researcher at Stanford. And she shared in this book a story, her story, of realizing that she had drugified certain types of stories for herself. And they were, what were they? They were definitely in the page-turner category of vampire erotic novels.
VYBARR: Each to their own.
KATY: Yeah, exactly. What do you think of the concept of "rescued by books" in the sense that they are creating a particular biochemistry for us that affects our nervous system?
VYBARR: That's very interesting. I've not really thought about it in that way. I mean, for me personally, to have been rescued by books, you know, part of what we are, what we read is about is I've used my own story to talk about how ragged my life was without books. And that even the process of writing about the chaos of that life - the chaos of some of my upbringing but also the chaos that I then fashioned for myself in my adolescence. Once I discovered books - I discovered books when I was about I think I'd just turned 21 when I read the first book in a kind of literary way where it was something that really really came alive for me. So for me, it was like dropping a pill or even taking heroin for the first time. I haven't taken heroin for the first time. But you know it was just this completely transformative experience. Obviously, books had been around and books had been presented to me at school and what have you but I wasn't ready for them. And then from the moment I was, it was like I had been given a drug - a really, really good one that completely changed my life and led to me living a life surrounded by books and teaching people about them. So in that sense, they were like a drug for me. They did rescue me. And one of the strangest things of writing about my life before books was it did really feel like I was writing about someone else. I found that it was difficult to remember what that person was like. It was difficult to understand any of their motives. I'm saying they, but of course, it's me that I'm talking about. I didn't understand their motives. I didn't understand what they thought they were doing. What they thought they were doing all that time doing those stupid jobs that they were no good at. So for me, it was like before rescue after rescue. And those two things are completely different. Different people. Books, more generally, I think there's some research done I think it's 2009 where even reading fiction for six minutes - for six minutes a day can reduce stress by about 68 percent. So just the fact just opening the curtains to that other world when we read some fiction we just open the curtain and look through it a little bit. And it's almost as if we just need that respite from the bump and the crash of our every day. So there are, without question, there are, the reading of fiction reduces cortisol. I'm sure, you know, we all know what cortisol is. I mean, we need cortisol as well. But you know, it also reduces cortisol. But part of what really grinds my gears is the fact that we shouldn't be having to make these justifications for reading. We don't need science to tell us that reading is really good. We don't need science to tell us that stories are good and that they are worthwhile things. And I think I say towards the end of the book when I've quoted another statistic or another trial, the fact that we're always retreating to science to say now it's okay you're allowed to do these things is indicative of just how much trouble we're actually in. And that so much of the decision-making weight has been ceded to the sciences, the humanities, and the arts is having to justify itself in this rather odd way, really. So, yeah, books definitely are a drug. They are good for us. But nobody's reading books for their health benefits.
KATY: Unless it's nonfiction - I'm just saying. And I'm just going to poke at this one more time because this is something that I think about a lot. And it's going back to that weird phenomenon. And, there have been books around for a very long time, but I don't think there was widespread literacy around until much more recently. The Luther Reformation of the church is going to be a big marker in terms of literacy, where it's not something for...not even the elite class, but maybe the spiritual elite class, you know?
VYBARR: In the UK, mass literacy arrives really when it becomes the law for
children to go to school.
KATY: Which was when?
VYBARR: And that happened in 1880. So that means that by about 1900, there is suddenly a mass reading population because those children have come to maturity. So it's very, very late.
KATY: Yeah, sort of right around industrial ... to me, it's sort of an industrial revolution change as far as humanity goes.
VYBARR: a bit later.
KATY: I just think I guess more broadly in hunks. I just love the word hunk. As we've moved to becoming more literate ... So what I heard you say was there's been this splitting between the humanities and the sciences which has been around we would say forever but we really mean in the last couple hundred years. Still in that same timeframe.
VYBARR: Yeah.
KATY: But I just hypothesize that it's the byproduct of literacy itself, where we stopped really thinking as holistically. Because we became more analytical. And then as humans tend to just tinker away with something they discover and keep tinkering, we became analytical in a different way. And I don't mean non-analytical in a pejorative way. Holistic thinking, seeing lots of integrated ideas that aren't taken out of context. Again, back to that Indigenous perspective where you're living and existing in a world that is - I don't want to use the word real because I don't want to confuse - but you're living in a world that is taking place maybe outside of your mind. You're reacting in your mind, but it's tangible outside of your mind. And then we go to books and it introduces this idea of - or not an idea they introduce a process by which some of your living is happening with inside your mind or you're reacting to things that happened a long time ago and then we get to this highly analytical place and then that itself is a faction of people. Right? Readers and non-readers as far as cultures go. And then we get to this literate culture and there's another faction: humanities and sciences. And we keep wanting to leave the other behind as no longer relevant to the world that we are creating. So we've left preliterate culture behind because they are so not with the times. And then now science is wanting to leave behind the humanities because it is so also not with the times. And we're not only having to look at science, should we read or not? It's, should we walk or not? You know, and it should be, how much water do we actually need to drink? You know, we are so outside of the actual experience. And at the same time, I love reading. I can recognize, or I would say I could recognize the importance of story. But why I'm picking away at the idea of oral story versus written story is I think that story has been around for much longer than written story was. I think that story is like barefoot walking to our minds. It's just, we have this high-tech version and just like any technology brings about many pros, there are some, we don't have to call them cons, but there are effects. And the effects are driving us in one particular direction. We don't have to make one positive or negative. But as humans are ever-evolving, this seems to be a place where we're evolving more towards a way of thinking. And now it's towards a particular way of thinking: scientific way of thinking.
VYBARR: I mean, I think there are a number of effects. I think one is the role, and I'm not qualified to talk about this, but one is the changing role of religion within our lives, especially since the Industrial Revolution. I think that's a big one, especially in terms of storytelling. The other one to think about is as well is the Enlightenment. That turn, that scientific turn in the 18th century. And ever since then, what we're seeing is we are living within an increasingly mathematical reality. And there's a little story that I tell in the book about - Universities have been around for about a thousand years. It's only in the last 200 years that somebody had the idea of, "Oh what if we tried to grade the papers?" What were they doing for the other 800 years? It was in 1792 an engineer had this idea, "Okay we should put a number on the assignment as to how good it was". And so this started off as a kind of odd and quirky characteristic experiment. And now everything is mathematized. And I think it's continuing. It's not accelerating, I don't think. But I think it's continuing. And numbers are persisting in pushing their ways into aspects of our lives that they're not really needed. But it's just taken for granted that numbers will explain something. That if you need to find out how good a degree is then you survey the students and then you'll get a number. And the number will tell you everything about the degree so I think this is the fact of the ways in which our culture has been mathematized, i think also plays a role in this kind of - science is kind of seeking to take responsibility for being able to explain our culture because everything is explained with numbers. And stories are old. Stories are fun. Stories tell us things. You know, we learn things from them. For some people, they're like a mantra or a prayer. They're things that people return to repeatedly in times of need. I've got books that I've read numerous times. Middlemarch by George Eliot or Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. And every time I read them, I talk about this in the book, it's like, instead of looking at a painting where the painting is the same every time you look at it, reading a book at different times of your life, it's like walking around a sculpture. You know, the light hits it differently and you see shades and there are shadows that weren't there before. And that just kills me. I mean, I love that about fiction; the fact that they have this kind of magic - magical way of predicting the future or holding on to your future and not revealing it to you yet. So it absolutely kills me that there are lines in Great Expectations or Middlemarch or any of the many books I love that I'm not yet old enough to understand. You know, I'm plenty old. But there are experiences in those books I've yet to have. And they've been there the whole time and my eye just hasn't caught the grit of them yet.
JEANNETTE: I love that bit in the book too. Because I'm the same. I read very different books, I think, now than I did when I was younger. And if I go back and read, I can still enjoy books that I read when I was younger and I get something different from them. So I definitely, I really resonated with that. I just want to go back to the science humanities first, if we have time. I'm fascinated by this. I am really, really interested in the philosophy of science. And as a biologist and a scientist, it troubles me that there are scientific stories that try - and I use that term - there are stories that biologists create and physicists create that are very attractive. And they have been, I feel, misused because they're trying to explain things that are not true. They are out with the remit that science can explain.
VYBARR: And Darwin had this trouble. Darwin had precisely this trouble.
JEANNETTE: He did. And his ideas were taken by, well, economists for a start, Herbert Spencer, et cetera, but also the meme idea, which we're very familiar with now as an internet meme, but actually it was coined in the late 70s as a cultural equivalent of a gene.
VYBARR: Yes. I forgot this. Yes.
JEANNETTE: So it's got this very - and supposedly it's an analogy to a gene. So supposedly it has that evolutionary algorithm that it can be affected in the same way as natural selection. Which is mind-blowing, really, that that idea came up and I think now people have picked it apart. But it was really really an attractive idea that was very public that we could explain culture in this way. And that's why people like you are working. The humanities are there explaining human culture and perhaps scientific analogies are not the way to do it. But these are very powerful ideas that came from the Enlightenment and beyond. And it's because they provided a good story, or not a story, a good... They worked well in science. They worked well in biology doesn't mean that they necessarily work well for human culture.
KATY: Yeah I was going to ask you as we close, are books hard on the body? Let's talk to the writers. Yes. So I stay healthy.
VYBARR: Look at me, I'm a wreck.
KATY: Yeah. I recognized long ago that a large - just as you're saying a large portion of your reading happens after you've read - a large part of writing for me is not happening while my hands are on a keyboard. Once I could really tune into that I was not actually needing to do most of my writing time in my office with my hands on on my keyboard, but what I did need was uninterrupted time. So I need time away from my children, essentially. Uninterrupted time. A place where my body was doing something simple that I didn't have to think about, but would occupy some of the restlessness of my body that was interfering with me connecting the thoughts in my mind. I realized that I could do a lot of writing, synthesizing of ideas, and examples, walking. And so feeling okay, not being in my writing space was a big part of reducing the amount of time I've spent sitting down inside a dearth of natural light. And so that has been a big piece. A dynamic workstation, you know, writing a lot, sitting down on the ground or, or standing. And not even standing really well - slumped over, you know, a counter versus slumped over sitting on a desk in a chair. So just changing my slumpage positions, adding a little variety there. And then yes, recognizing that the writing tools that we're using are not only our mind, but also our hands and our arms, shoulders, and spine. And keeping those parts fluid. In the way that I would not want a sticky keyboard, you know, had a letter that was always sticky or a space bar that didn't work. I don't want a shoulder to ping or an elbow or a finger to ping every time I go to do something. It's so distracting. So I oil myself in the sense through movement and I prioritize. I need to take care of my writing utensil right now, which is a bigger part of me than I had maybe thought of before. And then, like an athlete, I have writing warm-ups that I do physically. I have exercises and stretches for writing breaks and I stick to them.
VYBARR: Very impressive. I'm glad I asked that question.
KATY: For your next book.
VYBARR: For my next book yeah. Writing on the floor. I like the idea of that. That sounds like the right thing to be doing. Because you're having to get down you're having to get up.
KATY: Yes and stretching your hips out. Yeah. Lovely.
VYBARR: What about you Jeanette?
JEANNETTE: Well, I don't write books but I read a lot and I write shorter shorter articles. And I have a standing workstation which I love. And I definitely move quite a lot because I can't be still in one position. But, I realized there's something I can put my - I stretch my hips by putting my foot up on something, but only on the left side of my workstation. So I had to kind of rejig something so I could get movement on the other side. And then now I have a laptop. And that's been actually a really good change for me because I realized I was so used to standing, I almost couldn't sit. I'd get down on the floor and be like, oh, I'm just, I got so strong at standing. So now I have a laptop and I just move. I sometimes lie on my front on the floor, tap away. I'm on my standing desk and I have a kitchen counter. So I just move about. And I'm lucky because I primarily work from home. So that's an easy thing to do. And, then just, yeah, little breaks, definitely, throughout the day is what works best for me. And I also try and structure my day so I don't have long chunks. Like if I have a bunch of computer work to do, and then I have other bits in between, you know, planning a class, or then I'll structure it so that I don't have these long structures. Because that's what fatigues me. If I can spread it out through the day, I can do the same number of hours. But if I need to be doing four hours at once, I would be sore, I think.
VYBARR: I need to mix it up for my next book.
JEANNETTE: What is your next book?
VYBARR: Oh gosh too soon. So the previous book Primate Change, I was very good with that because it was about - well it's about so many things but it's about movement. So i was very aware of what I was doing while I was writing and researching it. So I wrote - I kind of do a sort of five-mile circuit from coffee shop to coffee shop with a laptop. But this one - it was just so many things were happening in my life that I became completely static when I was working on it. And yeah, I got to the other end of the process and go, "yeah, you can't do that again. You can't do that again. You got to do something different."
JEANNETTE: Oh, goodness. I have to think. Fiction, right?
VYBARR: Do you want me to start and you can think?
JEANNETTE: Yeah, that sounds good.
VYBARR: Okay. So my favorite book I've read recently that actually came out recently was called The Bee Sting, as in being stung by a bee. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. It's an enormous book. It's about 650-700 pages long. And when you read the back of it you'll see it's about a family in southern Ireland. And you just think "oh right 700 pages is that really necessary?" And it starts off, it's teenage girls in Ireland. And Paul Murray's essentially - he's referred to as a comic writer. So the teenage girls are being teenage girls and it's all quite amusing. And you think okay this is fine. It's beautifully written. It's got to be all snapped and the prose. But about 40 pages in I was thinking "okay is this it? Is it going to be 700 pages of comedy? Because that's quite a hard sell. And it just gets darker and darker and darker. And then we move on, after several dozen pages, we move on - I think I can't remember who comes next - but the little brother. And then we go to the mum. And the mum wasn't formally educated. So the mum has no punctuation. So we have 180 pages of chapters where there's no punctuation at all. And then we go on to the father's story. And by the time I was about halfway through, I was absolutely wrapped by the crisis that this family found itself in. It was extraordinary. And I actually stopped reading it because I thought, if I'm not careful, I'm going to be through this in three days and I'll have forgotten about the Barnes family. And so I actually stopped and read several other books and then went back to it. It was terrific. I've got one more recommendation, and I've got it over there on the shelf: The Overstory by Richard Powers.
KATY: Yeah.
VYBARR: Okay all right so I don't have to sell that one.
JEANNETTE: Got that one.
VYBARR: I think about it nearly every day still.
JEANNETTE: That one my mum read and she bought it for everybody and sent it to us all.
VYBARR: So I went on a book-selling course because at one point I was interested in owning a bookshop. And the bookseller that ran the course said when men come into the shop and they don't know what to buy he gives them a copy of The Overstory and says if you don't like it you can have your money back. And he'd never had a copy back amazing.
JEANNETTE: Yeah fabulous book.
KATY: Jeannette, you have one?
JEANNETTE: Well I'm going to keep on those same two themes just because they both have multiple stories in them. So I love books like that - that you have different narrators. And it's one I read years ago, but it just came to me as you were talking about those, which is Bone Clocks by, (you might have to help me,) David Mitchell.
VYBARR: David Mitchell.
JEANNETTE: David Mitchell. How did we not realize that? And again, it's told through largely, one person-centered, but it's again, it's wonderfully written because it's these different characters. There's a tribe of people who are reincarnated. And there's some other faction, the horologists I think they're called, are the reincarnated people who are fighting for good. And then there's this extraterrestrial element. And it's it's wild and fabulous. And it's also quite meaty so it'll keep you going.
VYBARR: Wow!
JEANNETTE: I also like it there's a lot - I don't know whether it's intentional - but there's quite a lot of weather and climate imagery in it. So it's it's not overtly about climate change but there's that kind of element running through it. Yeah well worth it.
KATY: Great. Well, mine's also sci-fi. It's The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, which is just, I feel, such an essential book for these times. And i'll just give you a short little blip. It's in the future and in the world they've detected through radio telescope alien song or communication. And the first people to muster and get themselves to this planet are the Jesuits. I won't say any more than that. But it's a wonderful look at, I would say, I think vegetarian or veganism, I think is in there. Language is in there. The impact of culture on biological systems. It's all just woven together beautifully. Well, thank you so much for coming onto the show. It was wonderful talking with you.
VYBARR: What a pleasure. Thank you so much. It was great talking to you both as well. Thank you.
KATY: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
JEANNETTE: Amazing. Thanks
VYBARR: All right all the best.
KATY: Anyway I thought that was a great conversation I'm so excited he came on to the show. I've known Vybarr, I met him a few years ago. I mean how many years ago was I there?
JEANNETTE: Well, I was thinking because I didn't really meet him. I know he came to your workshop in Cambridge, which I think must have been in 2018.
KATY: Yeah. I feel like that's about right. So six years ago?
JEANNETTE: Yeah because he had definitely published...
KATY: Primate Change.
JEANNETTE: Yeah.
KATY: I think he had published Primate Change by that time.
JEANNETTE: For sure.
KATY: Which is also a great book.
JEANNETTE: It is. And I think all listeners would really get a lot out of them. It's a nice meaty book with a, you know, prehistory. And it talks bone, you know, sedentary behavior, air pollution, you know, it really covers an awful lot. So it's well worth a read. Yeah. So it was lovely to have him on, especially when he's just launching a new book.
KATY: I know we got there first.
JEANNETTE: Yeah.
KATY: I feel like we got there first. And I will continue to think on some of the points that I am interested in teasing out which is, I do think that literacy and books will end up leaving a mark in humans like fire has, you know?
JEANNETTE: Yes. I think so too. And I think what's particularly, and we didn't quite get into this, but the difference to me between oral and books is the fidelity. Oral stories change much more, whereas we have this time now where we're fixing an idea. And that was bound to make a mark because it radically changes how information is stored...
KATY: Stored. It's how it's stored.
JEANNETTE: ...and passed on. So yeah, I think it's fascinating.
KATY: And we didn't even really get a chance to talk about, you know, in this conversation of, are books hard on the body just the act of reading usurping time from doing other physical tasks.
JEANNETTE: That's right. There's a trade-off. You're doing something good potentially for the brain...
KATY: Mm-hmm.
JEANNETTE: Well definitely good for the brain. And we're talking about just physical things. But there's always that trade-off.
KATY: The brain is physical.
JEANNETTE: The brain is physical, yeah. And there's a trade-off.
KATY: That's a trade-off. That's what the pros and cons list is. We are making choices that are shaping us a particular way, and they're shaping our culture in a particular way.
JEANNETTE: Yeah. And that's another thing about oral stories. A lot of oral stories would have presumably been passed on on the move.
KATY: Of course.
JEANNETTE: And there's the, I mean particularly in Aboriginal culture, when it was actually part of kind of a mapping, a landscape mapping, the stories were geographically important in passing on information. So yeah, I think it's quite a deep topic.
KATY: Yeah it's interesting. I love nuance. And I heard Vybarr really give multiple definitions of reading. Right? Reading happens when I'm sitting in my book. Reading happens when I'm thinking about my book. And also reading different types of books are different types of reading. I did resonate with the idea of - I know the kind of reading I want to do. Sometimes I want the mental workout.
JEANNETTE: Yes.
KATY: And sometimes I want the book equivalent to a Hallmark Christmas movie where there's almost nothing in there at all.
JEANNETTE: Yes. Absolutely.
KATY: But it's sort of a distraction. And I've also made a decision a lot of times to replace some books with audio books - some physical books with audio books. Yes, for the physical benefits. But too, because to me it's a way to tap into the oral tradition. But of course, oral recorded is different than oral being generated from these sort of oral artists. I do think just like some people could read, very few, most people could not. There were some people who could storytell.
JEANNETTE: I think there were professions within within a community, yeah.
KATY: Yes. Readers were the professional readers of a culture. Storytellers were the professional storytellers of a culture. And just like we have culturally gone from generalists to specialists - this might just be another avenue of that. Right now we're all storytellers professionally. Now we're all readers professionally at that professional level the volume is there. And what is lost is sort of all of the non-professional aspects of a culture. Right? Going back to just looking at the weather, knowing plants.
JEANNETTE: Right.
KATY: Where that common knowledge of those early communities and communities that are still around now that are so place-based and just need to have that map. I do wonder about while humans are still generalists, culturally we don't really seem to be. We have a niche.
JEANNETTE: I think what you're saying is we used to have these very specialized skills, and we had specialized skills and general skills. And the specialized ones have now become our general ones.
KATY: Exactly. Exactly. Yes.
JEANNETTE: And we've lost the skills that were general in the past.
KATY: Yeah. We've lost the collective knowledge that everyone shared. And what's interesting is what was the relationship to story and the general collection of knowledge that everyone shared. I wonder how much story was reinforcing.
JEANNETTE: Oh, I'm sure.
KATY: You know? Like you were talking about directionality and why mountains were there and to explain ... the characters of your life were not just the people in it. I think maybe that's the power of The Overstory, the book.
JEANNETTE: Maybe, yeah, that otherness.
KATY: You can see that there's more than just the people going on. So perhaps we just need more stories. We need not as many human-centric stories if we're to start to go back to the general collective knowledge. At minimum that there are other things here that are having their physical experience.
JEANNETTE: Yeah. And I thought that when we were talking actually about the nonfiction fiction. One book that I read recently, which was amazing, and I'm not going to be able to remember it again, what's it called? Something like In A Sense. And it's a nonfiction by Ed Yong. And it's all about animal senses. But he writes it about trying to understand how the animal experiences the world. Which I thought was amazing. And that's the problem with fiction. It's not so easy to write from the perspective of non-human creatures.
KATY: Yeah.
JEANNETTE: So I was actually blown away by this book because he kept presenting imagine if you could do this. And it was mind-blowing. Like imagining - there are insects and birds that can see colors that we have no concept of because we can only imagine colors with the three color - you know the rods that we have.
KATY: Yeah.
JEANNETTE: And the fact is I can't even conceptualize what this color would be like because it'd be like nothing like anything I know. Which was mind-blowing to me.
KATY: But, that's how I think about the world. I keep thinking we're trying to explain phenomenon that we do not even have the anatomical capacity to perceive.
JEANNETTE: Yes exactly.
KATY: So you had mentioned that a little bit where there's sort of sometimes like an overstepping between the philosophy and science is trying to explain phenomena that might just be off our spectrum, off our human spectrum.
JEANNETTE: Yes. Exactly.
KATY: And I, I'm fully on board with that, of that being okay with me if, if that's the case.
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JEANNETTE: Yeah. Which most definitely is for all of us.
KATY: Yeah. Why wouldn't it be? Why would I have the top level of perception when I don't even feel I'm that sophisticated of an organism? You know, I am, depending on the perspectives that you have for it, but. I don't know. Little old humans. Little old me. Ok, well that was lovely. Thank you so much!
Hi! My name is Susan and I'm from Gaithersburg, Maryland. This has been Move Your DNA with Katy Bowman, a podcast about movement. We hope you find the general information in this podcast informative and helpful, but it is not intended to replace medical advice and should not be used as such. Our theme music was performed by Dan MacCormack. This podcast is produced by Brock Armstrong and is transcribed by Annette Yen. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to audio. And find out more about Katy, her books, and her movement programs at NutritiousMovement.com.
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