This is Your Brain on Fiction, Literally

A new study in the journal Psychological Science used MRI imaging to study the brain as a person reads and proved, once and for all, what we already suspected: Reading fiction really is genuinely stimulating and a like living vicariously. (Click here for a larger view of the image above.)

"Readers use perceptual and motor representations in the process of comprehending narrated activity, and these representations are dynamically updated at points where relevant aspects of the situation are changing," says Nicole Speer, author of the study. "Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change."'