The Science of Sight and Sound in Storytelling: The Neurological Impact of Visual and Verbal Mediums on Narrative

Author

Abstract

The relationship between medium and content has long been a hotly debated topic in media studies, but perhaps no one broached it in such a controversial way as Marshall McLuhan.  His famous assertion that “the medium is the message” has been regarded at turns as prophetic, overly deterministic, or somewhere in between.

However, while there appears to be a great deal of discussion on the topic from the media theorist’s perspective, analysis of a medium’s biological impact seems to be an emerging field.  Neurologically based studies in this realm tend to approach medium within the broader context of language and storytelling.  These works rarely, if ever, connect their findings to McLuhan.

In this project, the practical applications of McLuhan’s theory are put to the test by contrasting brain imaging results of patients engaging with either written or visual narratives (novels or comic books).  By comparing the differences or similarities in interacting with each medium, a biologically based analysis of McLuhan’s claims is provided.

The research was gathered with the assumption in mind that different brain regions would be highlighted in accordance with different mediums if McLuhan’s argument is biologically correct.  However, the results indicate that the neurological impacts of medium are much more complex, especially when accounting for psychological or emotional factors that cannot be measured via fMRI.  Overall, providing a new perspective on McLuhan reveals insights about the potential accuracy of his theory and its applicability in both media and neuroscience fields.

Project Goals:  This project was completed on assignment for Dr. June Oh, in response to our class reading materials exploring the role of medium in storytelling.  Our readings included chapter excerpts from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.  My goal, to satisfy both the assignment rubric and my own personal curiosity, was to test McLuhan’s most famous claim against modern scientific research about how the human brain interprets stories told through different mediums.

Creative Process:  I have long had a casual interest in neuroscience, despite lacking extensive skill in any STEM field.  When confronted with McLuhan’s assertions that different media create fundamentally different interpretive outcomes from the audience, and not on the psychological or emotional level, I was eager to explore how well this claim may hold up to modern brain imaging technologies like fMRI and EEG.  McLuhan’s claims were first published in 1964 and don’t seem to have declined in general popularity among media scholars.  In searching for biological, rather than theoretical, scrutiny of the topic, I found nothing. 

This lack of evident testing for McLuhan’s claim sparked my interest and prompted many hours of reading, writing, and diagramming within a scientific discipline that was entirely new to me.  Because my work came from the perspective of someone largely unfamiliar with the neuroscience field, I constructed my project to be more of an exploratory, interdisciplinary article than a definitive scientific analysis.  Additionally, I tried to make the complex information relatively accessible to the average interested reader by employing colorful interactive diagrams, a sketchbook visual aesthetic, and a less-than-solemn tone, at times.

Research Question:  Is McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the message” compatible with a modern understanding of how our brains interpret stories across different mediums?

Project: The Science of Sight and Sound in Storytelling: The Neurological Impact of Visual and Verbal Mediums on Narrative