Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Suggestion that those well-crafted sentences (previous post), strung together in novels, are deeply enriching.

The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction - NYTimes.com:


Neuroimages University of Limerick


The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...