Three Percent: Arnon Grunberg's "The Quantified Writer" Project

Arnon Grunberg's "The Quantified Writer" Project

18 November 13 | Chad W. Post

I don’t know much about this Quantified Writer Project, but seeing that it combines two of my favorite things—Arnon Grunberg’s work and neuroscience—I feel like I really should.

Here’s the basic description from Arnon’s website:

Dutch author Arnon Grunberg and his publishing house, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, initiated the formation of a top class research team that will investigate the physiological processes governing the production and perception of art in a unique collaboration between scientists, an artist and the public.

The team plans to take detailed measurements of the brain activity and the physical signals recorded from the author as he writes his new novel. This will take place in New York, where Grunberg lives, starting November 19th and lasting two weeks. The next phase, in the fall of 2014, will be to study members of public (n=~50) reading the new novel in a controlled situation. On top of this, and using a limited set of parameters, the team will study brain activation in several thousand readers.

There is also a LiveStream box on this page, so maybe we’ll all have the chance to watch as Arnon writes? Regardless, this sounds really cool, and I’m very curious about the results. It seems like something could fit right into Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, but, you know, actually factually accurate. (Yeah, I went there.)

tags: arnon grunberg

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