The Scientific Reason Why You Get Lost In a Book

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pete9012S
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The Scientific Reason Why You Get Lost In a Book

Post by pete9012S »

The Scientific Reason Why You Get Lost In a Book
Ever had that experience reading a novel when you become so absorbed that you forget to each lunch or you miss your subway stop? Or you're turning the pages so fast when you look up the house has gotten dark around you, and you realize you've been squinting to see the words. You probably call it "getting lost in a book," and we could all probably name a novel that has caused this to happen. No surprises here, but many people mention J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series as making them victims of this absorption.

For the first time, bookish neurologists have looked into what causes people to get lost in a book, and they've used Harry Potter books as research. A team of researchers and scientists lead by psychologist Chun-Ting Hsu at Free University of Berlin in Germany studied brain reactions to particular passages in the Harry Potter books to see if certain types of excerpts facilitated the immersive experience.

The result was the "fiction feeling hypothesis," which the research team describes as:
According to the fiction feeling hypothesis, narratives with emotional contents invite readers more to be empathic with the protagonists and thus engage the affective empathy network of the brain, the anterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex, than do stories with neutral contents.

For us non-scientists, it essentially means emotionally charged book passages → empathy with the book characters → brain engagement → getting lost in a book.
https://www.bustle.com/articles/48494-h ... -in-a-book" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Do you agree with the findings? Could it be applied to Enid's work?
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Re: The Scientific Reason Why You Get Lost In a Book

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

I'm not sure that it's only "emotionally charged" passages that cause me to get lost in a book. It's more a case of feeling such an attachment to the whole fictional world that I become totally immersed in it and lose touch with everything else that's going on. It has happened a lot with Enid Blyton books over the years because her style is so natural and immediately accessible and her characters and landscapes feel incredibly real. I'm just as absorbed by the little details (e.g. good-natured teasing between the main protagonists, delumptious teas, sightings of puffins or turning sheds and caves into meeting-places and homes) as I am by the more eventful happenings at the height of an adventure or drama.
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