Your Brain On Fiction Analysis

The Link between Reality and Imagination Some people, such as the world’s greatest artists and scientists have vast imaginations that transcends reality. But other people have a blurred line between the link between imagination and reality, so they can’t make sense of what is real and what is not real. The truth is, the similarity between reality and imagination occurs in our mental psyche. According to Annie Murphy Paul in “Your Brain on Fiction,” the brain does not make a complete distinction between reading about and experience and encountering it in real life. This connection between physical and mental experiences stimulate the same regions of the brain. The article, “Your Brain on Fiction” written by Annie Murphy and “Writing against time” by Michael Clune support the notion that there are profound similarities in the mental processing of the reality of an experience and the mere description of it. An imaginative thought based on a literary text connects similarly to experiences in the real world. But the latter diverges from reality, because people have their own perceptions of reality. Keith Oakley, from the University of Toronto proposed that “reading produces a vivid
stimulation of reality, one that runs on the minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” To digress on Oakley’s point would mean introduce the introspective connection between a person and what they perceive in fictional literature. There is no definitive image that can be ascribed to the setting of work of fiction. For different people, different images would pop into their heads. Clune notes that, “Insofar as the imagination causes the same feelings as the real, it does so by using the same structures in the brain as those used by the real world,” meaning there is no large distinction between the brain processing imaginary and real scenarios. Murphy also supports this claim of a thin line between imaginary and reality. According to her “there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.”
When you dream about people you dream about them the way in which you see them, not the way in which they actually are. A person in the dream can be the warped version of the person. Although the same mental processes are in place to allow for imaginative thoughts to bleed into reality, the perception of the reality alone may be uniquely different for each person.
Another fact that connects to perception is time and its power to dull the perception of something.
To put it simply, the more we see something, the more eroded our experience of it becomes. Exemplified in this quote by Clune, “Familiarity thins out sensory engagement nearly to the point of evaporation. The “stretching” of memory and anticipation replaces listening, seeing, touching. We are buried alive in time.” The importance of this quote revolves around time poisoning perception. There have been numerous times when someone has wished that they could have an experience last forever, to relive the same sensory experiences they felt for the first time. But deep down this desire to relive past experiences is not a realistic one because of time slowly eroding our perceptual
experiences.
Time cannot be stopped, but time can be slowed. When we perceive something for the first time we take in all it has to offer. Experiencing a thunderstorm for the first time would mean smelling the crisp wet air, viewing the clouds intermingling in a dance, and feeling the raindrops patter relentlessly following a loud deep rumble sound in the skies and a flash of bright light and the crackling sound of lightening.
An important question stated by Michael Clune is if art is different from life. The scientific consensus is that due to the similarities of neural processes in the real and imaginative world, art is not so different from reality. A study done to facilitate this argument occurred by getting subjects to respond to a verbal description of a beach. The subjects’ response to this study helped draw the conclusion, peoples’ brains process fictional information in a similar way to how real images are processed.
The differences between the two processes of reality and imagination include three things. First, the interpretation between a description of an event and the experience of an actual event takes various “linguistic and cultural competences and assumptions in order to turn the marks on the page into an image he understands the author to intend to project”. The previous quote means interpreting a thunderstorm from the description of a literary text takes on the readers own introspective processes in order to assume what the author meant to describe. The second difference includes the mental processes that arise after reading of a description of something does not entail the same kinds of reactions from people as the actual experience of something, like a thunderstorm. And lastly, literary images are less vivid then actual images, which anyone can attest to. The vividness in a literary work can depend on the author and their literary technique, but ultimately experiencing a thunderstorm arise more of our senses than reading about a thunderstorm and picturing it in our minds.
Is experiencing something different from reading about it in a literary text? According to the claims of Annie Murphy and Michael Clune, not completely. In fact, the distinction between experiencing something and imagining it from literature is limited to perception, vividness, and our reactions to them.