On the face if it, watching a movie ought to be a lot more intense than reading a book. After all, in a movie you can actually see things happen to people. When reading a book you have to imagine it. But human brains are wonderful things, and a recent experiment has shown that reading a description of an event in a book has very much the same effect on your brain as watching it happen in a movie.
Now here’s a modest proposal. What if you ran the experiment with a number of different stories, all describing the same thing, but written by different people. Would that prove which writer was the best? Oh my, can of worms.
If there was only one subject in the experiment you could find out which writer that person liked best.
If there was more than one subject, they’d all need to have a vote.
And since you wouldn’t want the best writer being selected merely by plurality, you’d include a ranking system, and an elimination runoff, so that the winner closely reflected the community’s sense of who is best.
And, of course, you’d want the winning writer to know how highly you think of his or her work, maybe send along some kind of statuette. Something longer than it is wide. Chrome plated, to avoid weathering.
And now, about that wheel I wanted to reinvent…
You could sort out the most effective tear-jerkers, perhaps, but the “bestness” is of course *much* more complicated than that!
Also the test subject would get used to the plot and the later stories would not get as big reactions, even if they were better written…
Would that prove which writer was the best?
Prolly not, because each subsequent version of the same tale which the subject read would see a degradation in response, and each new test subject would require a unique re-weighting of response monitoring. Chaotically variable calibration issues across experimental subjects, basically.