What happens in our brains when we read? Last week, PhysOrg.com reviewed a new brain-imaging study that aims to resolve this, with pictures of the human brain on fiction. The full research is forthcoming in Psychological Science, but the brief article had a fascinating summary of why the real world seems to recede when you’re really absorbed in a story. As I’m reading two extremely different books right now, Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, I was curious about what effects, neuroscience-wise, this might be having.

The data the brain takes in when reading makes parts of the brain ‘light up’; it turns out that this activity closely mirrors the mental simulations involved when we perform, imagine or observe real-life actions. The leading author of the study, Nicole Speer, concluded, ‘Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change.’

But, she goes on, we really gain understanding when we link events and relationships in a book with our own, non-fictional lives. So, in a way, we’re unconsciously trying to convince ourselves that we’ve lived the story: we integrate the experiences told in the story with our own memories and personal knowledge.

The brain imaging must have been amazingly painstaking to produce, and rather Clockwork Orange-like to set up. Traditionally, reading has been near-impossible to track using fMRI technology because of the expense of using the machinery for long periods of time and the risk of subject movement skewing results during the experiment. To look into the neuroscience of reading, Speer and her colleagues had to immobilise subjects within the machine and present them with one word at a time on a screen directly in front of them, to minimise eye movements.  It was worth it – link through here for a panel from the finished, ingeniously colour-coded brain images !

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