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Bondi Media

Fictional 🧠 Brains

Annie Murphy Paul has written about how reading fiction and pleasing descriptive prose can be quite evocative. And this, according to neuroscience, makes novels cognitively stimulating and even influential on real life actions. 📖

a brain with tearful emotion
@gasparuhas

Established research has shown areas of the brain interpreting written language but researchers now find new areas being activated when reading compelling narratives — scans show that reading emotionally charged passages, detailed descriptions or pleasurable metaphors can stimulate brains. 🤩

Words like ‘lush’, ‘lavender’ or ‘lemon’ can even invoke brain areas centred around smell. Tests using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with Spanish language words for ‘perfume’ and ‘coffee’ lit up specific brain regions unlike when using more prosaic terminology like ‘chair.’ 🪑

Metaphors involving texture like ‘velvety voice’ activate the brain's sensory cortex for perceiving texture through touch. 👌

Descriptions of motion can also stimulate the brain's motor cortex. So, reading ‘Cowboy Carter booted the ball’ stimulates the area coordinating the body's movement. Scans even show different areas of the cortex responding to descriptions of specific limbs doing different things! 💪🦵

child's mind following a story
@julientromeur

In fact, brains largely don't differentiate between reading an experience and actually having it. Novels can embed readers into the action where the thoughts and feelings of characters in novels can get the brain to treat character interactions on the page as similar to actual social encounters. Perhaps our political class should read more Gabriel García Márquez!? 🔖

The novel … is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and 🥰 emotional life. Annie Murphy Paul.

Psychologists call the brain's capacity to map the intentions of others ‘theory of mind’ and see considerable overlapping between this and the cognitive networks involved in understanding fictional narratives. Some studies even suggest that people who read a lot of fiction may be better able to understand and empathise with others. 🎗️

Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined. 🤔 Annie Murphy Paul.