Scientists and fiction-writers face the common challenge of awakening their readers' senses. Especially when offering a new model or perspective, scientists share the creative writer's task of using language to activate the imagination, of getting readers to see what they mean. To feel real, language aimed at the imagination must appeal to every sensory modality, much as the world acts on all senses at once. In collaboration with neuroscientists, literary scholars such as Elaine Scarry and G. Gabrielle Starr have begun studying the ways that finely crafted literary language can cue visual mental imagery, or combinations of visual, auditory, and motor imagery. This presentation will compare the ways that neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal and biologist James Watson appealed to their readers' imaginations in their scientific and popular or fictional writing. The analysis will focus on Ramón y Cajal's short story, "The Corrected Pessimist," in which a depressed scientist suddenly sees the world as though magnified 2000 times through a microscope; on Watson's and Francis Crick's The Double Helix; and on scientific articles and books by Ramón y Cajal, Watson, and Crick. Ramón y Cajal called his 1905 story collection Vacation Stories, hinting that for a scientist, writing fiction involves mental play. I will argue that for a scientist presenting a new way of seeing cells or molecules, fiction-writing can offer a valuable mental workout: the task of mustering language that will evoke in others what one inwardly senses to be true.
