.
| Hearsay: |
Readers’ brains work like rats’, with each piece of fiction being built in a simulated environment like a maze map in a tiny little rodent brain. This means reading isn’t passive, but rather an active exercise for the old noggin. Ah, science. Thankfully we have you and your kooky, well-funded labcoat warmers to prove the things artists have been saying since forever first fucking began. Surely there must be some way to monetize this research or turn it into a bomb, right? Otherwise, how did it get funded?
“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,” says Jeffrey M. Zacks, study co-author and director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.
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.
Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings 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 sensation 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.
January 2006
December
2005
November
2005
October
2005
September
2005
August
2005
July
2005
June
2005
May
2005
April
2005
March
2005
February
2005
January
2005
December
2004
November
2004
October
2004
September
2004
August
2004
July
2004
June
2004
May
2004
April
2004
March
2004
February
2004
January
2004
December
2003
November
2003
October
2003
September
2003
August
2003
Bookninja © Copyright
The opinions expressed on this site are those of individual participants
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the site owners,
organizers, or other participants.
[powered by WordPress.]
January 29th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Last year Liam Durcan wrote in the Globe’s Book pages about a study out of UT that found that reading fiction improves social reasoning. God I love this stuff. Keep it coming.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Yes!
January 29th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
I am using my fiction as a mind control experiment. Slowly getting people adjusted to my maze and subliminal suggestions. It all started in High School with my toaster waffles suggestive poetry…and next thing you know I will rule the world!
Dr. Evil
January 29th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
I can understand your feeling that we already knew what the results of this study show. It does seem intuitive, and anyone who has cried their way through a box of tissue after reading a particularly sad novel will certainly not be surprised by the outcome. However, the results don’t just say that we empathize with the characters in the book, but that we, in a sense, become the characters in the book – seeing what they see, hearing what they hear, feeling what they feel. We are understanding what is going on by drawing on our own actions and perceptions in the real world. Our understanding of stories is not based on an abstract dictionary in our brains, or a box of facts about the world. We are using our experiences in the world, our memories of real-life actions and perceptions, to make sense of what we read.
If you’re still not convinced this study was worth your tax money, consider this point: We all have intuitions about how the world works. People thought the world was flat for a very long time. What would have happened if no one had ever tested that intuition? Sometimes intuitions are right, and sometimes they are wrong, but if we never test them, we will never know one way or the other.
January 29th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
This might just be the grad student in me speaking, but this looks like the type of study that might make it a little easier to secure funding for creative works. If that’s the case, yay neuroscience!
January 30th, 2009 at 6:40 am
Hi Nicole, You probably are new to Bookninja, but rest assured everything I say is with tongue firmly in cheek, and I have a long-running joke about scientists and experiments. I just consider it my duty to make fun of science as much as I make fun of religion. The monetize/bomb comment was expressing disbelief that this got funded because it doesn’t immediately support a war effort or lead to a patent.
Just jokes. I thought your study was interesting and useful.
January 30th, 2009 at 7:07 am
Becoming the characters in the books we read means we should all be reading much pornier books.