Earlier this week, while reading Ray Bradbury’s classic, Fahrenheit 451, on the bus to work, I somehow managed to miss my stop because I was so focused on the book. This got me thinking about how incredible it is for reading to have such a powerful effect on behaviour. Losing yourself in the story is often considered to be a marker of a great book.
As often happens in these types of situations, my curiosity carried me away into finding out more about the mechanism of why this happens. What does science tell us about this phenomenon?
The fiction feeling hypothesis states that narratives with emotional content are easier for readers to lose themselves in because they facilitate empathy with protagonists and key characters. They do this by engaging and activating parts of the brain that shape feelings – AKA the affective empathy network.
In a study that investigated the fiction feeling hypothesis, researchers assessed the extent of immersion and brain activity in relevant regions of the brain among people reading text passages from Harry Potter books. Specifically, differences were evaluated between the effect of reading text that was ‘fear-inducing’ versus text that was considered to be neutral.
Immersion ratings and brain activity in key regions correlated more strongly with fear-inducing passages than with neutral text. Additionally, descriptions of key characters’ pain or personal distress increased the involvement of the core structure of pain and affective empathy in the brain and enhanced immersion in the story.
Overall, the study showed that emotional content, especially that of a negative, arousing, and suspenseful nature, activates the affective empathy network, which drive an immersive reading experience. What does that say about people? Are we sadists or just really attuned to the suffering of others? I’ll let you decide 😊.
