Getting Lost in the Books
Reading can really captivate you sometimes
If you enjoy reading, then I am certain that you might have got lost in a book at least once. You know the feeling: you are so captivated about the book that you seem to ignore everything that goes around you. Our world no longer exists; you are part of the world present in the book. Suddenly you are near Dorian Gray, you are following Holden Caulfield to see what he will do next, or you suffer along Raskolnikov.
In certain moments the plot of the book is so intriguing that it manages to captivate us completely. Science has investigated this behavior for quite some time now, and it has discovered that one of the main reasons why we get lost in the books is because the brain analyzes the information from the books, just as it analyzes the events which happen in the real world. It has been previously proven that our brain has the capacity of processing written and visual information exactly in the same manner it processes the actions we do ourselves. Thanks to this information, the researchers might understand why some people like to read more than the other people, and why the reading abilities change over time.
There are some people who can paint a more vivid mental picture of written prose than other men can, and thanks to this they are captivated by the books much easier. The previous studies made in the domain have revealed the fact that there is not too much of a difference between the way in which the brain processes first-hand experiences and the way in which it processes images, written words, videos, and so on. The brain uses very similar stimuli in order to processes these two types of information. The process of running or kicking a ball would activate almost the same stimuli as the ones activated when we read the verbs to run and to kick. However there is a main difference between reading a single word and reading a longer passage.
Jeffrey Zacks and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis want to see if the same pattern occurs in the case of continuous reading, and they do so by using MRI scans in order to observe the brain patterns of the volunteers who have agreed to participate at the study. There were 28 people who participated at the study. 20 of them were women and 8 of them were men. They were asked to read four narratives, each less than 1,500 words, which were taken from the book “One Boy’s Day.” The words from the book were flashed onto a screen and as a result the participants were able to read even when they were inside the magnetic resonance imaging machine.
The book was created by the psychologists as a research tool, and it presents the adventures of a boy during a single day. The researchers used this book with a purpose; the book contains information with which the readers can easily identify. It presents activities which the readers most likely have often performed. The book does not contain many novelistic techniques which are present in the more modern books, and as a result, the readers do not have a difficult task comprehending the information. The researchers expected to see six different types of changes in the minds of the readers. These changes would most likely occur in real life, and as a result they have been featured in the narratives as well.
The changes included spatial changes, which occurred when the location in the passage was changed, object changes, which occurred when a character picked up a certain object, character changes, goal changes, which occur when a certain character begins a new activity with a certain goal in mind, and causal changes which occur when an activity happens that wasn’t caused directly by the activity in a former clause.
It is very important for us as humans to monitor those changes in the environment. It is believed that we were able to survive, mainly because we were able to observe those changes. The ancestors might have used that information in order to predict what might happen next, where the pray will be next, where a predator might be, and so on. Thanks to that capacity, we might have the possibility of predicating what will happen next in a book. Zacks believes that these predictions are the result of the fact that we often do the activities presented in the book, and because of that we compare the real-life situations with the ones from the book.
After the volunteers finished reading, Zacks asked them if they remembered about where certain information was presented in the book. Then the researchers compared the MRI, to see if the changes in the writings coincided with the brain activity. The results showed that there was so relation between the events written in the book and the activity of the brain. For example when the volunteers read that the character raised his leg, the brain started to engage the part which is responsible with the movement of the leg. The research also showed that some people were more influenced by what they read than the other ones. For example the people who could picture what they read had a more intense brain activity than the ones who could not picture the information from the book.
Zack said that there are some readers who have stated that they can not imagine what they read, and in their case getting lost in a book is very unlikely. Zacks also believes that there might be a big difference between the ways in which the brain processes the information from the books. The age might influence the way in which the brain used the information it receives through reading. The length of the passages from the books is also important, as the longer phrases can influence the readers much more than the single words. One thing is for sure; reading can only do you good.
