Hurling Words Into Darkness: A Book Doctor's Dose of Brain Science for Writers

For thousands of years we've had theories and rules about writing based on tradition, philosophy, esthetics, poetics, scholarship, mysticism, and arbitrary dictates. Meanwhile, over only the past few decades, cognitive science has discovered much about how the human mind sees and orders the world and extracts meaning from it. It's high time we mix some brain science into our thinking about reading and writing.

Peter Gelfan has been a book editor for more than 25 years, editing for writers ra...