Original Post Date: March 2021
Excerpt Credit To: https://ideas.ted.com/how-literature-yes-literature-can-help-you-better-connect-with-others/
How do books pull off their magic trick of transporting us into another person’s body?
Taking a look at the brain — specifically, the multiple regions that engage and coordinate when we read — gives us a clue.
One of my favorite authors is Jane Austen, and in one of my favorite studies, literature PhD students were given a Jane Austen novel to read — but not on a couch. Instead, they read the Austen inside a fMRI Machine, which depicts brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Natalie Phillips, the literary scholar who worked on the study, hypothesized that the subjects, while reading, would experience an increase in blood to the areas of the brain responsible for processing language.
To her surprise, the students experienced a dramatic global increase, with blood flowing to areas that have nothing to do with processing language.Say you read a passage about running through a forest. You’d expect the left temporal lobe, the area responsible for language processing, to light up. It does — but so does the frontal lobe’s motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. In fact, it lights up in the same way it would if you were actually running. Say you read the words “lavender” or “coffee” or “cinnamon.” You’ll experience the activity we’d expect in your left temporal lobe but you’d also have activity in your olfactory cortex, which lights up in the same way it would if you were actually smelling those scents.
This kind of activity doesn’t happen with fact-based nonfiction, such as political journalism, movie reviews or Ikea bookshelf assembly manuals. That Ikea manual might result in a cool bookcase, but if you want to light up your brain like fireworks on the Fourth of July, you need to stock that bookcase with Jane Austen (and read it).
COMPLETE POST AVAILABLE AT:
https://ideas.ted.com/how-literature-yes-literature-can-help-you-better-connect-with-others/
