Insights From Neuroscience: Your Brain On Fiction - An Essay.

What Happens in Our Heads When We Read Fiction?

AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. 

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. 

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. 

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not. 

Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg. 
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. 
The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters. 

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers. 

It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents, they may experience more “parent-children conversations about mental states” when it comes to films.) 

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.” 

These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. 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. 

Re-read the article assigned by your professor for the Diagnostic 

Your Brain on Fiction, and respond to the following 7 questions: 

1: Identify Audience 
Who is the target audience for this article? What evidence can you find in the article to support your answer? 

2: Identify Purpose 
What is the purpose of this article? What evidence can you find in the article to support your answer? 

3: Quote and Cite Main Point 
Using the table below, respond to 3a), b), and c).  Write each component of the sentence in the appropriate cell. 

a: Identify Main Point 
Using the author’s original wording, write down the main point of the article. Remember to use quotations around this passage. 

b. Create a Signal Phrase 
Add a phrase to the above passage that introduces the idea and indicates who the author is. 

c. Cite 
:Add the in-text citation to the passage above. 
[signal phrase] 
[main point] 
[citation] 

Sample: 
Studies on comics show that “this challenge to combine words and pictures is fundamentally about creating an effective design that can attract readers through multiple communication models” 
signal phrase] 
[main point] 
[citation] 

4. Paraphrase and Cite Main Point 
Using your own words and sentence structure, restate the main point of the article. 

5. Cite Paraphrased Main Point 
Add the in-text citation to the passage above. 

6. Identify Support 
What support does the author provide for their main point?

Paraphrase and cite these points below: 
a. 
Point 1: 
b. 
Point 2: 
c. 
Point 3: 

1.The article aims to reach out to the general readers who have believed that reading can influence the cognitive and behavioral attributes of an individual, basically with reference to speech recognition and language development. As mentioned by the author it suggests that the brain can develop emotive feelings and thereby develop its imagination through reading a fiction.  The evidence comes from various researches done all over the world by neuro scientists who have observed that the brain reacts to certain words and “metaphors” in a similar way when we are actually performing those actions in real life. Several journal like the “NeuroImage”, have published researches which prove that the sensory cortex responds to words that refer to senses or talk of odorous substances and not just the Broca’s area responsible for identifying languages.

2. The main purpose of the article is to identify the behaviour of the brain with respect to reading. The reaction of the human brain when it experiences certain words, phrases or metaphors is relative to its sensory reflex. This article has tried to validate that the brain does not perceive words or phrases as mere words rather reflects on the sense of the word or phrase. This has been substantiated over various research performed by neuroscientists attempting to understand the cognitive behaviour of the brain. The research by Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, reveals that individuals reading fictions, have better understanding of the world around them, of the people and their situations.A similar research was done in 2010 which revealed that reading stories to preschool age children enhances their thinking capacities (Mar, Tackett& Moore, 2010). The purpose of the research aims to understand the effect of fiction reading on the human brain and the way it manipulates the perception of the same.

3.

4 and 5. Dr. Oatley has revealed that reading can produce a simulation of reality in the brain, and has compared that to the simulations of a computer programme (Oatley, 2006).

6. Support of the main idea put by the author are as follows”

• There is evidence that supports the brain portrays the depiction of smell, texture and movements in a vivid expression.
• Researchers have also observed that words that describe action or motion stimulate the regions of the brain that are different from areas of language processing.
• It has been inferred from research by Dr.Oatley that the brain, creates similar reactions while reading about an experience and practicing it in real life and for both the cases similar neurological regions are stimulated
  (Mar&Oatley, 2008).

References

Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on psychological science, 3(3), 173-192.doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of research in personality, 40(5), 694-712.doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x

Mar, R. A., Tackett, J. L., & Moore, C. (2010). Exposure to media and theory-of-mind development in preschoolers. Cognitive Development, 25(1), 69-78. doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2009.11.002