Join us Saturday, December 17, 2016, at 2:00 p.m. at the Four Points by Sheraton, 5115 Hopyard Road, Pleasanton, as Ransom Stephens, Ph.D. presents “Get Inside Your Reader’s Brain: The neuroscience of how to make readers laugh and cry.”
Neuroscience is like looking under the hood to see how It works. When you know how readers process your writing, you can figure out what grabs readers, what bores them, and why. In this presentation, we’ll investigate how to write in ways that administer dopamine when you want readers happy and withholds it when you want readers sad. We’ll explore the roots of what people like, and why bestsellers aren’t always critical favorites. Art is subjective, but our subjectivity has a lot in common.
Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., physicist, science writer, and novelist has written hundreds of articles on subjects ranging from neuroscience to quantum physics to parenting teenagers. His new book, The Left Brain Speaks but the Right Brain Laughs (Viva Editions, 2016), is an accurate irreverent look at neuroscience for a lay-audience with emphasis on innovation in art, science, and life. His first novel, The God Patent (47North, 2010), was “the first debut novel to emerge from the new paradigm of online publishing” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. His second novel, The Sensory Deception (47North, 2013), is a mind-blowing, globe-trotting ride that will take readers from cut-throat Silicon Valley boardrooms to the pirate ships off the Somali coast to the devastated rain forests of the Amazon all to ask the question: what is a human life worth compared to that of an entire planet? He builds his novels on accurate, digestible science to investigate complex social issues like the science-religion culture war, environmentalism and technology, plutocracy and anarchy. Ransom has given thousands of speeches across the US, Europe, and Asia and has developed a reputation for making complex topics accessible and funny. For more information on Ransom, visit www.ransomstephens.com.