Reading and Action Meet in the Brain

[jason]

Aaron over on the Education Policy Blog writes: Reading and Action Meet in the Brain

A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to “get lost” in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.
“Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story,” said Jeffrey M. Zacks . . . .
The study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, is one of a series in which Zacks and colleagues use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track real-time brain activity as study participants read and process individual words and short stories.
. . .[F]indings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensations are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine or observe similar real-world activities. . . .
Changes in characters’ locations (e.g., “went through the front door into the kitchen”) were associated with increases in regions in the temporal lobes that are selectively activated when people view pictures of spatial scenes.

Read the article he’s referring to. I’ve always had a thing for books and reading, and I’ve thought that many writers I don’t like are just interacting with the work in a way that I don’t. Says a lot about who gets popular and who does not.

Comments

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

I talk about this in the first chapter of my dissertation.

Which specifically, is about how Shelley and Stoker and Rossetti used emotion and realism (and now, possibly the rapid scene changes) to grip and keep readers, and they laid these techniques underneath their social themes of radical science and imperialism and gender--and they discovered a really potent formula. The things that provoke fear (or humor) are things you remember.

Which in the case of these three, also capitalized on the 19thC premium placed on innocence.

[complicittheory.livejournal.com]

interesting! I have an unpublished article somewhere around here about how the virtual worlds set up by Stoker in Dracula and LM Montgomery in Anne of Green Gables have actually caused the real world to change to conform to the text. I'm not sure about "The things that provoke fear (or humor) are things you remember." though. Yes, you're right, but they didn't discover it. It is in the writings of Locke, Burke and Berkeley. The victorians just applied them to the greatest affect that still effects us. I wonder if it changes over time.

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Shelley was informed by Locke, though, and as the author arguable "first fully realized SF novel," I think she hit on something with a mix of fantastic mode, and affective narrative--what I am saying is that the 19th-century SF&F writers did use them to extraordinary effect. They brought several threads together in one weave, I think.