Smells, textures, images, sounds, emotions—if you’re a writer, you can use each one to activate a theatre of neurons in your readers’ brains. It’s up to you to compose a script to play out word for word on your reader’s mental stage. 

An example: When researchers asked people to read sentences like, “He unscrewed the cap,” they detected a change in electrical activity in readers’ hand muscles. Words processed in the language-processing circuits, in other words, sent signals to the brain’s motor circuits, and in turn to the muscles.

Such research points to a simple fact: When you read, your brain is set abuzz in a much broader way than scientists once thought. If you’re a writer, you could initially come to the conclusion that such broad-based arousal, by itself, would be received by readers as inherently pleasurable. 

The secret to great writing, in other words, would simply be to activate the brain broadly, stimulating full-bodied, full-brain action. A well-activated brain is a well-satisfied one. 

Not Your Ordinary Pleasure

But a friend and mentor, John Butman, was not convinced. John, a longtime author and premiere book-writing consultant, essentially asked, “Is that all there is to it? The secret of writing is to spur enough arousal to whip up pleasure?”

John—whose death this spring was such a loss—challenged me: Isn’t there something more that binds great writing together? John, who was at times a technology writer, put it this way: I wish there were a single “algorithm” that writers could follow to harness what scientists are discovering.

Though he never knew it, John sent me on a deep dive. Psychology and neuroscience, I found, pointed to a single truth about great writing: It plays not just across multiple stages in the mind. That is, it doesn’t just whip up a three-ring circus of arousal. It plays first to the brain’s central motivational machinery, what scientists call the “reward circuit.”

Hidden in the midbrain, reward-circuit neurons heed, value, and provide pleasure when people encounter an appealing stimulus. The stimulus could be a donut. Or it could be words, phrases, and sentences. For writers, what matters is that readers constantly seek promising cues to fulfill their desires. When a cue comes up, neurons in the reward circuit release dopamine.  

Dopamine, largely a signaling chemical, also prompts the release of other chemicals that give readers a pop of pleasure. It doesn’t matter if the stimulus is a tasty donut or nice turn of phrase. If your brain sees potential value, the circuit fires and pleasing neurotransmitters flow. The reader (or donut eater) feels motivated to keep consuming. 

An Irresistible Incentive

Pleasure, say scientists, is nature’s incentive for making us do things that make us better—better able to survive and thrive. In this light, the reward circuit is essentially a motivation engine. As psychologist Kent Berridge and neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach write: “In a sense, pleasure can be thought of as evolution’s boldest trick, serving to motivate an individual to pursue rewards necessary for fitness…”

When it comes to reading, readers thirst for somewhat different things. But everyone’s impulses come from a common foundation. The reward circuit, in other words, wakes us up to and propels us toward consuming rewards of all kinds, from those we get from eating, socializing, mating, taking care of young, and protecting family.

And of course, from reading good articles and books.

Thanks to today’s technology, we can even see the reward circuit in action. Researchers use MRIs, EEGs, PETs, galvanic skin-response monitors and other high-tech gear to show off images of what’s going on below our scalp. 

As complex as great writing might seem, a single principle ties it all together: Great writing comes from “rewarding” readers—in both the popular and neuroscientific sense. 

So what’s useful about the eight Ss I introduced in my previous blog post? Keep it simple, specific, surprising, stirring, seductive, smart, social, and story-driven? Each S outlines a strategy to keep your readers reading. Evolution wired us with the drive for learning, and part of that learning comes from consuming well-written prose. 

What my friend John told me was correct: pleasure, as a guide to great writing, is too simple. Pleasure is a motivational driver, a “bold trick.” The search for and consumption of rewards are its cause. So what’s the “algorithm” for great writing? Writing to reward your readers—and rewarding in ways that promise to make them better.

Image credit: National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health