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Dan Brown on The Secret of Secrets
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
When an academic question became personalBrown had been building toward this subject since at least 2009, when he created Katherine Solomon, a noetic scientist, as a secondary character in ‘The Lost Symbol.’ The research he did for that role planted a seed he couldn’t uproot. What finally cracked the project open was not a new discovery but a death.
my mom died eight years ago, right as I started this book, and it really was a catalyst as I started to learn more and more about out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences and some of the physics that is really suggesting, if not proving, that our consciousness can survive the death of our physical body, which, of course, has enormous implications for everyone on a personal level.
Before his mother died, Brown held a position on the afterlife that he describes as settled and unexamined. The grief changed not just his emotional state but his intellectual starting point. Asked directly during the NPR interview whether he now believes consciousness survives death, he placed his current answer against the one he would have given eight years earlier.
And eight years ago I would have given you a totally different answer. I would have said, death is the end, full stop. Total blackness. The end.
That reversal, from committed materialist to serious believer, is the same journey he built into Langdon’s arc through the novel.
One specific laboratory result pushed the subject from interesting to unavoidable. Brown encountered it while reading broadly in neuroscience, and it broke his assumption that the brain is a passive receiver of experience rather than something that reaches forward in time.
I read about an experiment in precognition where different parts of the brain light up when you see different kinds of images. In the study, the brain was lighting up before an image was seen.
The experiment had no settled explanation, but either candidate, that the brain previews its own perception or that time is not strictly linear, ruled out the standard materialist account. Brown told the Exeter bulletin that the finding forced him to reckon with consciousness not just as a writer but ‘from a personal level.’
How he wrote it
Hugging smoke across eight years and a million wordsThe formal problem Brown faced was that his subject had no body. Earlier Langdon novels could anchor their secrets in manuscripts, frescoes, and hidden chambers. Consciousness offers none of that. He described the challenge to the ‘Express’ after the book’s release, having spent years working out how to make the intangible feel like something a reader could chase.
Human consciousness is a very ethereal topic. I had to figure out how to make it into something that felt concrete and urgent. It’s kind of like trying to hug smoke — you just can’t quite get your arms around it.
The physical setting was one of the first decisions to lock in, chosen because its history mirrored the book’s metaphysical concerns. Prague under Emperor Rudolf II in the late 16th century had been a gathering point for alchemists, Kabbalists, and mystics working on exactly the questions Brown wanted to examine. The city was also, as he told the AP, perfectly suited to Langdon’s usual environment of hidden passages and sacred architecture.
‘The Secret of Secrets,’ about human consciousness, could only be set in Prague. It’s been the mystical capital of Europe since Emperor Rudolf II (in the late 16th-early 17th centuries) brought all the mystics and scribes and alchemists to Prague. And as a character, Prague is perfect for Langdon. It’s full of secret passageways and cathedrals and monasteries and all, that’s his world.
Brown spent time in Prague collecting sensory detail, but his method of recording it was deliberate. Photographs capture what a place looks like. Brown was after what it feels like at the level of texture and smell and sound, details that a camera passes over and that a page can hold.
I try to write down descriptions, rather than take photos, because you may forget certain sounds, such as the way the elevator in Petřín Tower scrapes every few feet during its ascent, or its funky smell.
The draft volume on a Brown novel is staggering by any measure, and ‘The Secret of Secrets’ ran longer and harder than most. He told PBS that knowing the ending before he starts is a structural requirement, not a preference, but knowing where you’re going doesn’t reduce the sheer mass of words a 200,000-word thriller demands.
This is a 200,000-word novel. I easily wrote a million words, 800,000 of which disappeared.
Brown described to the WMUR interviewer how he used Langdon as a proxy for his own eight-year arc through skepticism and toward belief. The character’s one-day journey through the novel compressed a decade of reading in physics, neuroscience, and philosophy, including conversations with noetic scientists and people who had experienced near-death events.
Took him a day. Took me eight years. He’s a little brighter. [paraphrased from audio]
The compression is not just a plot device. It is Brown’s argument that the evidence, encountered honestly, moves a skeptic. Langdon’s conversion is the thesis.
What he wants us to sit with
Fear as the thing the science might dissolveBrown is emphatic that the science in his novels is not decoration. For this book especially, where the experiments he describes are real and the researchers are named, he wanted readers to be able to verify the claims Langdon makes and to keep reading after the novel ends. He explained the stakes of that commitment to PBS.
I want the reader to know that when Robert Langdon is talking about an experiment that proves precognition is a reality, I want the reader to know, no, this really happened, and here’s the date it happened, and here’s the scientist that did it. I think it makes the book relevant and exciting.
Brown’s broader goal for the reading experience is that the teaching should be invisible. The novel includes footnoted references to real experiments, but within the story itself the information has to earn its place by moving the plot. He drew the distinction clearly in the same PBS conversation.
Not all thrillers need to teach. That’s what I like to do, because I like to learn, and I think a lot of readers like to learn. I like to create thrillers that teach. Ideally, if I have done my job, you don’t notice that it is teaching.
The deepest intention behind the book is not intellectual but psychological. Brown emerged from eight years of research convinced that consciousness survives death, and he believes that conviction, if it spreads, has consequences for human behavior that reach far beyond the individual reader. He told the Phillips Exeter bulletin what he hopes the science ultimately does to people’s emotional lives.
If we can adopt a mindset where we realize that human consciousness survives death, maybe some of that fear starts to dissolve. And the thing about the fear is that it’s really the catalyst for a lot of bad behavior.
Brown entered the project as someone who would have dismissed near-death experiences as drug hallucinations. The book is, in part, a record of what changed his mind, written for the reader who currently stands where he once did.