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Filling in the Blanks
Playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, and librettists deliberately leave "holes" in their narratives and descriptions. The greater the skills of the artist, the more artful the incompletion. The imaginations of readers and listeners are tasked to complete the work. Thus, art is completed by the audience.
For centuries artists, critics, and audiences have pondered this compositional strategy, especially for its ability to create the sensation of satisfaction in understanding, or in "getting it." A number of narrative devices - foreshadowing, for example - provoke our minds to "fill in the blanks."
Scientists at University College, London may have discovered the neurological basis for this phenomenon. 
Working with fMRI devices, they have studied brain area 10, that part of the brain that is involved in imagination and in reality-checking. This part of the brain develops last and is twice the size in humans as it is in other animals.
Dr Jon Simons and Dr Paul Burgess led the study at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr Burgess said: "In our tests volunteers either thought they had imagined words which they had actually been shown or said they had seen words which in fact they had just imagined - in over 20 per cent of cases. That is quite a lot of mistakes to be making, and shows how fallible our memory is - or perhaps, how slim our grip on reality is!
"Our work has implications for the validity of witness statements and agrees with other studies that show that our mind sometimes fills in memory gaps for us, and we confuse what we imagined occurred in a situation - which is related to what we expect to happen or what usually happens - with what actually happened."
The methodology used by the scientists:
In the tests, healthy subjects were shown 96 well-known word pairs from pop culture such as 'Laurel and Hardy', 'bacon and eggs', and 'rock and roll'. The participants were asked to count the number of letters in the second word of the pair. Often the second word wasn't actually shown and the subject had to imagine the word – such as 'Laurel and ?'.
Participants were then asked which of the second words they had actually seen on screen and which ones they had only imagined. The subjects' brain activity was observed using fMRI scans while they remembered whether words had been imagined or seen on screen.
According to the paper, those who did not remember correctly had diminished activity in brain area 10.
So, I wonder, is a robust ability to complete artists' works (imagination and foresight) a strength? Or does it result from diminished activity in brain area 10?
To paraphrase the extravagantly witty Canadian humorist, Sandra Shamas, "Is this some new kind of stupid?"
Posted on June 25, 2006 07:44 AM | Permalink
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Comments
So now art is making us more stupid! Nice!
The only discrepancy that I can see in drawing links between this research and the audience filling in the blanks in artists' works, is the fact that all of our life experiences—our personal baggage—inform how we make those interpretations of and extensions to an artist's work. Our intellect, emotions, and values play as large a part in how we fill the gaps, as does imagination. This leads me to deduce that the development of the whole brain is important to engage in art.
Perhaps as much research should be done to see the effects of abstraction on all parts of the brain!
Thanks for the comment, Shawn. I think that the point of the research here is to elucidate how areas of the brain specialize in their functionality.
What I'm trying to point out through this post is a comparison/contrast of the imagination function. In the arts - and in interaction with art - we not only value the imagination, but artists prompt its use through specific devices. Thus, the suppression of what's factual or real by brain area 10 (reality-checking functionality) amplifies the imagined richness of the experience.
On the witness stand, however, the authors (and most of society as well) would posit that an active imagination not only fails to advance understanding, but subverts truth.
This is a compelling example of a real paradigm sheer where context is everything and process is secondary. The same brain process occurs in the art gallery as occurs in a court of law, but what is valued is quite different.
I find this whole issue fascinating. That subperformance in one domain could be hyperperformance in another signals extraordinary richness and complexity. These things are what it means to be human.