What is Brian's brain doing?

We're using Brian (I don't even know a Brian) as an example because I misspelled Brain three times, so I think it was meant to be. I looked into (again) just a little bit of what the brain is doing when it interacts with literature (specifically fiction). It's a piecemeal article, broken into sections for your viewing pleasure.

• Bits and pieces activate in the brain:

  • Neuroscientists have found that when you read a vivid piece of fiction, like a character running through a forest or feeling heartbreak, your sensory and emotional brain regions activate as if you yourself were having the experience. When you read about smells, the olfactory cortex lights up. When you read about movement, the motor cortex engages. When you read emotional or moral conflict, the prefrontal cortex and limbic system activate, the same regions tied to empathy and moral reasoning.

  • This discovery supports the psychological idea that reading fiction strengthens empathy (direct plug *** go read it if you haven't, it's my post on empathy), emotional intelligence, and theory of mind (our ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings).

  • So, fiction doesn’t just describe emotion, it rehearses it. Your brain treats reading as a kind of mental simulation of life itself.

• You make better mental maps (after making and using a new one for every book that isn't polite enough to give you one in the front of the book)

  • When you read, your brain doesn’t just process words, it constructs a mental simulation of the events, spaces, and relationships in the text. This includes where things are located, who is doing what, and how those things change over time. Cognitive psychologists describe this as a situation model (essentially a mental map of a story’s world).

  • Readers with high comprehension skills form these models faster and more accurately, tracking shifts in location, perspective, and causality. Practice makes perfect.

•  The hippocampus, the same brain region used for real-world navigation, also activates when people track story settings or spatial relationships described in text.

  • In other words, reading exercises the same neural systems used for mapping space in the physical world.

• Advanced or frequent readers are better at integrating spatial, temporal, and causal information at once. They are also adept at visualizing complex environments or storylines (fantasy worlds, intricate plots, etc.). And updating those maps as new details emerge (ex. remembering where a scene is set or who is present.

  • This is why avid readers often excel at visual-spatial reasoning, problem-solving, and even real-world navigation that depends on mentally rotating or tracking information (I mean I only get lost sometimes, and I'm better than most of my friends at directions, so.... a win is a win).

So basically, reading trains the brain to build and navigate mental landscapes. The better you are at reading comprehension, the better you are at forming, updating, and using mental maps (in both fiction and reality).