Your Brain on Fiction

The New York Times posted an interesting article on the neuroscience behind reading, how the brain reacts to the metaphors and descriptions in the same way it might react to the actual physical experience.

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.”

— Annie Murphy Paul, Your Brain on Fiction