I am sitting in a darkened, closet-size lab at Tufts University, my scalp covered by a blue cloth cap studded with electrodes that detect electric signals from my brain. Data flow from the electrodes down rainbow-colored wires to an electroencephalography (eeg) machine, which records the activity so a scientist can study it later on.
Wearing this elaborate setup, I gaze at a television in front of me, focusing on a tiny cross at the center of the screen. The cross disappears, and a still image appears of Snoopy chasing a leaf. Then Charlie Brown takes Snoopy’s place, pitching a baseball. Lucy, Linus, and Woodstock visit as well. For the next half hour I stare at Peanuts comic strips, one frame at a time. The panels are without words, and while sometimes the action makes sense from frame to frame, at other times the Peanuts gang seems to be engaging in a series of unconnected shenanigans.
At the same time, a freshly minted Ph.D. named Neil Cohn is watching the readout from my brain, an exercise he has repeated with some 100 subjects to date. Many people would consider tracking Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes comic strips unworthy of scientific inquiry, but Cohn begs to differ. His evidence suggests that we use the same cognitive process to make sense of comics as we do to read a sentence. They seem to tap the deepest recesses of our minds, where we bring meaning to the world.
Comics have been part of Cohn’s life as long as he can remember. He was drawing them by age 8. As a teenager he began to sell his own comics—a graphic novel about two people falling in love in one case, a dreamy series of meditations about philosophy in another. By the time he entered the University of California, Berkeley, as an undergraduate, he was a regular at Comic-Con, the gigantic annual comic book and fantasy convention in San Diego. “If you had asked my friends if I would end up as a scientist,” he says, “they would have all said, ‘No way.’ ”
That changed at Berkeley, where Cohn discovered linguistics. He was fascinated by how our brains find meaning in strings of words. Individual languages differ in terms of particular words and grammar, but all are just systems for building sentences. You could split any sentence into smaller units—the subject and the predicate, for example—and these could be broken down into smaller units still.
Few Rules, Infinite Variety
This hierarchy of big units and small ones helps make language both versatile and easy. Even though each of us has only a finite number of words in our brain (100,000 or so), we can use the rules of language to combine them into a practically endless number of sentences, conveying an infinite set of meanings.
“I started making connections between what was going on in language and what was going on in comics,” Cohn says. A comic strip is a string of panels, just as a sentence is a string of words. From Cohn’s own experience designing comic strips, he was convinced that both followed a similar set of rules. “Sequential images have a grammar like sequential words do,” he says.
It further seemed to Cohn that comic strips are made up of smaller units, just as sentences are. The narrative arc of a comic strip is made up of an initial group of panels that set up the story, followed by those that convey a narrative peak. These units, in turn, are made up of smaller units that accomplish other tasks, like establishing new characters and resolving conflicts.
Cohn suspected this was no coincidence: Comic strip artists were unwittingly exploiting the brain’s grammar-generating function. “The brain is processing these different kinds of grammars in a common way,” Cohn says.
After this epiphany, Cohn decided to go to graduate school and become a cognitive scientist who studied comics. And he knew whom he wanted to study with: Ray Jackendoff, a linguist then at Brandeis University who had done some of the most important research into language’s hierarchy.
Cohn wrote to Jackendoff, asking if he would take on a student who wanted to study how people’s brains make sense of comics. But Jackendoff couldn’t do it at the time. Crestfallen, Cohn applied to other graduate schools instead, supporting himself in the meantime by drawing comics.
As the years passed, his pile of grad school rejection letters grew. In a typical one, Cohn was informed that he was a great candidate, but there was no way a comic book artist could fit in to the school’s graduate program. Cohn’s ideas were just too far off the map.