In a truly cross-disciplinary collaboration at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), winners of a flash fiction writing contest will not only win a cash prize and have their story published in The Hopkins Review literary magazine, but their winning entries will be instrumental in a neuroscience study exploring how people remember stories and movies.
Another prize unlikely to be found in other writing contests? A framed brain scan of participants who read your story. Further atypical of this contest is that this one is completely free to enter.
Sponsored by the Chen Lab, housed in JHU’s Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, the inaugural “fMRI Writing Prize” aims to create both new literature and new science tapping the talent in both fields in Baltimore. The writing contest is open to writers in high school and adults in Baltimore City, and those studying the science include undergraduates through neuroscientists with years of experience.
“fMRI” stands for both “fiction Made to Read and Investigate” and “functional magnetic resonance imaging,” which is the machine into which subjects will be placed for their brains to be scanned.
The project is a collaboration between Dr. Janice Chen, principal investigator of the Chen Lab and assistant professor of psychology, and Professor Dora Malech, editor-in-chief of The Hopkins Review and associate professor in The Writing Seminars department at JHU.
Chen’s lab studies memory and brain activity using movies and stories, and she told Fishbowl that this is because the lab is trying to duplicate how the brain would operate out in the real world.
The Chen Lab’s primary goals involve understanding how the brain functions and how brain systems operate to support memory. Understanding that allows scientists to understand divergences like memory disorders better, and the work of her lab is foundational to that sort of work.
“We’re interested in that kind of naturalistic, rich experience and memories that people have for that material. And we use movies, we use stories, and usually we just draw stuff from the popular media,” Chen said of the study itself. This struck her as an opportunity to reach out to the writing community for participation and inspiration.
Malech was excited about the chance to connect with the broader literary community in Baltimore, especially inviting participation from young writers.
“It seemed like a great way to get the word out in terms of outreach about the science and just a kind of a novel way to get people interested and aware,” Malech told Fishbowl. “But it also seemed like a great way to kind of combine some of our department, the Writing Seminars, work with young people and work with literary publishing through the Hopkins Review. And those two hadn’t really come together before, until this project.”
The exact procedures for the experiment are not fully mapped out, partly because the material to be used (the writing) has not been chosen yet. Chen was able to give an overview of the general shape she expects the experiment to take, though.
“The stories that are selected we’ll use as stimuli in experiments where we study memory in the brain,” Chen explained. “So, probably we’ll have them audio recorded, and then play them to people who are in the brain imaging machine, and then have people talk about what they remember from those stories.”
People participating in the scientific aspect of the study would come to Kennedy Krieger and will be placed inside an MRI scanner. They would lie down on a bed that is slid into the scanner. While the participant is wearing headphones or earbuds, they would listen to a story being read to them, or watch a screen if they are being shown a movie scene, or even an entire movie.
While this is happening, the scanner would capture images of their brains roughly every one to two seconds.
“Then we have a microphone after you’re done listening to or watching the material. Then we ask you to talk about what you remember,” Chen said. “And typically, we say, ‘Just start at the beginning and retell everything that you can remember here.’ And they kind of recount the plot as if they’re talking to a friend.”
The scanner would capture images of their brains while they are recalling what they’ve seen or heard.
Chen envisions 20 to 30 participants listening to stories or material, then having the participants talk about it, and then having them take additional memory tests. Chen might combine the scans of each participant first listening to the story, then recalling and talking about it, or they might make a map of synchrony across all of the participants.
“When everybody has listened to the same story or watched the same movie, a lot of the brain synchronizes across people,” Chen explained. “And so we can actually make a map of the brain, which is like, where in the brain was there strong synchrony while they were listening to the story, right? And what’s happening in the story will dictate that, too. It’ll change slightly what that map looks like.”
Malech emphasized that they are looking for stories people would want to read whether they were a subject in the experiment or not. From a teaching standpoint she has found it interesting to see the overlap between science and writing.
“It’s been really interesting to see how what scientists are looking for often has overlap with writing prompts or things you would assign, you know, something that can be interpreted different ways, or something where there’s questions about causality, or something where people play with time,” Malech said.
She also wants writers to know the contest is not seeking out writing about science, necessarily.
“I think, because there’s the scientific aspect, there might be some immediate thought that, oh, the stories have to have a scientific aspect themselves, and we really do not need that in any sense,” Malech said. “In terms of the plot, Janice said it could be really interesting to have, in a really beautifully written story, to have ambiguous elements, where you do interesting things with time.”
The deadline for this contest has been extended to July 31, 2024. To learn more about the contest, click this link.
