From a
fascinating and disturbing article in The Chronicle, it appears that the answer is maybe, kinda, sorta yes.
With the aid of fMRI, Zacks and his co-authors peered deep inside the brains of volunteers as they read stories. What they found provided an intriguing insight into the way our brain constructs our sense of self. Changes in characters' locations (e.g., "went out of the house into the street") were associated with increased activity in regions of the temporal lobes involved in spatial orientation and perception, while changes in the objects that a character interacted with (e.g., "picked up a pencil") produced a similar increase in a region of the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Most important, however, changes in a character's goal elicited increased activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex, damage to which results in impaired knowledge of the order and structure of planned, intentional action.
Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we "mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative," according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.
Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, "The Dreams of Readers," "more alert to the inner lives of others." We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn't.
Combined with
other recent brain research on deep reading, maybe we have a new sort of argument to make to those who want to gut the humanities in favor of science. That won't help with the people who hate all knowledge and learning as belonging to "snobs," but it's a start.
1 comment:
This would, indeed, be good news. It might also suggest that our periodic attempts to systematize and rigor-ize (is that a word?) the study of literature (lots of genre/character/plot/archetype classification in the early 20th century; theories of various sorts; etc. ) may, in fact, be counterproductive. Talking about characters and their motivations (or, alternatively, authors or other historical figures and theirs) may have some value. Though I try to push my students to be analytical and rigorous, at least to a point, I could honestly live with the idea that what we're mostly doing is telling each other stories with a purpose.
I wonder whether anyone has done similar studies in a culture that is still mostly oral. It would be interesting to know how participants in such a culture's brains light up when they hear an oral version of a fictional/fanciful/magical tale, a story with religious significance, a family or group history, etc. Because humans were primarily oral transmitters of knowledge/ideas for so much of our history, I strongly suspect there's an oral equivalent, and that it's just as socially useful.
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