Why People Get Lost in Books

Any avid reader knows the power of a book to transport you into another world, be it the wizard realm of "Harry Potter" or the legal intrigue of the latest John Grisham.

Part of the reason we get lost in these imaginary worlds might be because our brains effectively simulate the events of the book in the same way they process events in the real world, a new study suggests.

The new study, detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Psychological Science, builds on previous work that links the way our brains process images and written words to the way they process actions we perform ourselves.

Examining these links could shed light on why some people enjoy reading more than others and how our reading abilities change with time. Essentially, some people might paint a more vivid mental picture of written prose than others.

Kick in the brain

Previous studies have monitored how the brain processes video, written words, images and other stimuli, and compared them to how it processes first-hand experiences. These studies have shown that the brain processes these two types of stimuli similarly.

For example, reading a simple verb such as "run" or "kick" activates some of the same regions of the brain that would be activated when we actually go running or kick a ball.

But reading a single word isn't quite the same as reading a long, continuous passage. Jeffrey Zacks and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis set out to see whether the same pattern held for continuous reading by monitoring the brain processes of study participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.

The 28 study participants (20 women and 8 men) spent about 10 minutes reading four narratives, each less than 1,500 words, taken from the book "One Boy's Day." The words from the book were flashed onto a screen that the participants could read on a mirror in front of their faces.

The book follows a school-age boy during a typical day, and was created by psychologists as a research tool. The passages were used in this study because they were a simple narrative of everyday activities that participants would easily relate to and process.

The book "avoids some of the novelistic techniques that would make it a little harder for us to generalize back to the understanding of real life," Zacks said, such as skipping around through time or long inner monologues.

Brain activation

The researchers coded the four narratives for six types of changes "that people might be monitoring while they're comprehending" — changes they would notice both in everyday life and possibly in reading, Zacks said. These changes included: spatial changes (when a location changed); object changes (when a character picked up a ball, say); character changes; causal changes (when an activity occurs that wasn't directly caused by the activity in a previous clause); and goal changes (when a character begins an action with a new goal).

Monitoring such changes in the environment is adaptive, because it likely helped our ancestors to predict what might happen next: where prey might dart to next or what a predator might do. Similarly, today it helps us predict what might happen next in a story.

Essentially, Zacks and his team were trying to suss out how a reader parses an ongoing text into meaningful events.

After the participants had read the passages, the researchers would ask them questions to see if they recognized where these changes occurred in the text. They then looked at the fMRI data to see if brain activity in key areas spiked with the changes — it did.

"It turns out that there are focal areas that are selectively involved in each of these kinds of processing," Zacks said.

The data doesn't show quite the same specificity that studies where participants read a single word show. For example, while reading the phrase "raise right arm" might activate the area of the brain that controls that action, reading that phrase in the context of a longer passage only shows activation in the general motor control areas of the brain.

Zacks is optimistic though that the results showing more specific match-ups "are going to generalize to continuous reading;" they will just take more testing and lots of data, he said.

Individual differences

Understanding how our brains process the events and changes while reading could help us understand some of the individual differences in reading, for example, why some people are sucked in by stories more than others.

While some readers can actually picture what they read, others may not.

"There are readers, competent readers, who say 'I have no pictures in my head when I read'," Zacks said.

Further studies could see whether there really is a difference between how the brains of these two types of people process the words and phrases they read.

"It may be the case that some people do this more than others," Zacks said.

With further study, Zacks also hopes to tease out how this brain processing changes across life span, and how it is affected by diseases such as age-related dementia and other neurophysiological changes.

The current study was funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Psychological Association (which publishes the journal Psychological Science).

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By Andrea Thompson, Senior Writer. This article officially published here

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From Holmes to Harry Potter; British popular fiction.

BESTSELLERS are in the air at the moment. A recent BBC television series "Reading the Decades" took a ten-yearly census of the books that had got people reading, talking and, most importantly, buying, during the post-war period. Now Clive Bloom extends that enquiry back to the beginning of the 20th century, by when Britain could be said to have become unequivocally literate (at the outbreak of the first world war only 1% of the population was still unable to read).

The reasons behind this sudden need to investigate what kinds of books people want to buy (or borrow, for Mr Bloom pays special attention to the role of local libraries in keeping sales of authors such as Catherine Cookson and Frederick Forsyth in their millions) are not hard to guess. The recent...

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Best Seller = Good Book?

What criteria for a good book? A writer in a mailinglist said that book which is reprinted several times, or best seller books, guarantee the quality of a book. This oppinion comes from the assumption if people read a books because they are interested with the book. So, if a book read by a lot of people, because the book is interesting.

Indeed, the assumption might be true. But it can not be fully justified.

If the criteria of a good book is measured by how much readers, how many books are sold, my question is, whether books that have not sold many, not the best seller book, assumpt as a bad book?

In Indonesia there are literary world abreast of the names of great writers have featured his work in various media, be discussed in various forums. However, their books are not reprinted. Nukila Amal, Linda Christanty, or who are senior, Budi Dharma, Danarto, Kuntowijoyo, are the author which known results many quality literary works, but their are not get a knowledgeable response from readers. In some cases, the assestment of the literary experts influenced readers, but in fact the taste of the expert and commons readers are not always in a same step.

For me, there are several factors that make a book can be marketable. For similar work teenlit-chicklit, so as the popular literary work in general, do have many more readers. This may be because the themes offered are simplet. And I suspect, most readers of literature in Indonesia is that they read the paper for entertainment, not to be examined, or to be highly critized. Even if there is a review, it is only vey small percentage if compared to those who read for entertainment, or a more subtle, to search for life lessons.

In addition to popular themes, which can trigger the power is the theme of the book selling polemic, such as "Jangan Main-main dengan Kelaminmu (Do not play with your sex}" by Djenar Mahesa Ayu, "Garis Tepi seorang Lesbian (Border of a Lesbian)" by Herlinatiens, "Tuhan, Ijinkan Aku Jadi Pelacur (God, Let Me Become Prostitutes)" by Muhidin M Dahlan. The polemic topic is unique, the more they are cencored, the more they sold.

In my oppinion, the paramater of a book is good or not, is not depend on the quantity of the readers. The paramater is not the quantity, but quality, the quality of appreciation from readers.

So,is still relevance to discuss a book from how many people buy the book?

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Loading the canon

When it comes to great books, lists are useful but should also be open to challenge and the element of surprise.


IF someone had told me in my 20s that Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is a story that debates the nature of God, I would have reached for it on the library shelf. I would have reached even faster if I had known the debate opens with a conversation between two brothers, one a sceptic, the other a monk, in the corner of a tavern over tea, preserves and soup. My interest would have been keener still if I had been told that this theodicy is wrapped in a murder mystery.

As it was, I came to the book late, when I was about 45, reading the first English translation, by Constance Garnett, republished in a fine 1961 edition of the Heritage Press, illustrated with lithographs. It has generous font size, something sadly that could not be said about any of the new translations.

When I told someone I was writing a book of recommended reading, published this week as My Reading Life (Penguin, 432pp, $35), his reply was: "What an old-fashioned idea." The opposite is true. In my 20s and 30s, I was restless about my reading choices -- too heavy on current affairs, political biography and contemporary fiction. I needed lists, recommendations, guidance. The barrier to reading the classics, certainly for me, was a fear of being bored. Guides such as Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why (2000) or David Denby's Great Books (1996) are relatively recent.

Not that every reader needs prodding. Friends told me of their 14-year-old daughter, who sailed through War and Peace, identifying with Natasha Rostov. As a result, Tolstoy's novel settled into the girl's bloodstream from an early age. Another mother told me of a teenage girl who read and loved what I have found to be Dostoyevsky's most bewildering novel, The Idiot.

We arrive in our own ways.

Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker, returned to Columbia University 30 years after he had first studied there to enrol in the two great books courses he had completed as a youngster. Sitting with 19-year-olds, he read again the literary masterpieces. In the story of this experience, Great Books, he celebrates Homer, Sophocles, the Bible, Austen, Kant and Virginia Woolf.

But with Goethe's Faust he "could make no more than a spurious connection with a great work that I did not genuinely enjoy". And Don Quixote left the reader "unhappy, even a little bored". Yet a banker recently told me Cervantes' novel had made him laugh out loud.

That's the litmus test for comic fiction and one I use for recommendations in Chapter Two of My Reading Life: Anthony Powell figures largely in my choice of comic writing, as do Chekhov, Isaac Bashevis Singer and -- this might surprise -- Patrick White. Contemporary readers are only likely to warm to White in books that show his corrosive satirical wit, such as The Eye of the Storm or The Twyborn Affair, rather than in his 1950s modernist experiments. The banker who liked Don Quixote had never touched my Russian friends, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov. By contrast, I view them as a whole lot less scary than Cervantes.

I heard an interview with Federico Fellini in which he said he had never read Marcel Proust or James Joyce but he had still absorbed them nonetheless: "It is not necessary to have read books or to have seen paintings: life by now is conditioned by these works; they are the spirit of the time. So it is enough to live."

This is rubbish, and lazy rubbish. The joy is to know these works first hand, make them friends, not know them by hearsay or Fellini-like osmosis. I found serious reading was the best respite from the gritty demands of being NSW Opposition leader and then premier. In those years I read not always for the absorption in easy pleasure you get from an Alan Furst spy novel set in occupied France or a James Ellroy thriller set in art deco Los Angeles (I include them in my recommendations) but for the longer-term pleasure of self-education or stretching one's consciousness. And, then, of revisiting Homer and Tolstoy or Joyce for a second or third time when a once-formidable clunky classic has been rendered translucent, even playful.

Susan Sontag said she was a different person because she had read Dostoyevsky. Different, yes, not necessarily better. We know from Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2004) that the mass murderer was awesomely well read from a personal library of heavily annotated literature. Abraham Lincoln, who spared the lives of deserters and emancipated the slaves, was narrowly read, although deeply.

Thinking through my reading choices drove me to Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature (1980). What a university teacher he was! I liked his observation that as infants we read to identify with characters, as adolescents we read to learn about life. But as adults we read books "for the sake of their form, their visions, their art".

Especially in rereadings. I found myself back in Joyce's Dubliners, savouring his art, lingering over a story such as The Boarding House. On a summer Sunday in Dublin, the lace curtains "ballooned gently towards the street beneath the raised sashes" and the breakfast plates bear the "yellow streaks of eggs with morsels of bacon fat". There are crusts of bread that will make Tuesday's bread pudding.

Here is Mrs Mooney's boarding house, 15 shillings a week for board and lodgings. There is gentle Joycean precision in the language but not just in the language, in etching the little world in which Mrs Mooney and her daughter trap a male resident into a dubious marriage.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce was to write about the "sordid tide of life", one of my favourite phrases from books; in Dubliners I admire the deft delineation of dingy, urban existences -- to invoke Nabokov, the form, the vision, the art.

As for the notion of great books, I've concluded I'm mostly on the side of lists but inclined to think we must challenge and not congeal a canon. To start with, I'm puzzled there aren't great books courses at Australian universities. They would draw students from the arid disciplines of law and maths. They would appeal to mature-age students who feel, as Denby or I feel, that our reading has slackened off. A list -- a canon -- of books disciplines our choices and provokes us. My university education was mediocre. The best thing about it was those reading lists in English: four novels by William Faulkner, six Shakespeare plays, a brace of D.H. Lawrence and so on.

But you can question and chop up a canon. I begin the first chapter of My Reading Life with Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, an account of Auschwitz survival and in my view the most searing testimony out of the horrors of the previous century. I match it with Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel, Silence, the title of which refers to the silence of God in the face of the suffering of missionaries tortured in medieval Japan. And I link it with a third book, The Brothers Karamazov. Each book handles the teasing question of a deity who allows suffering.

Yes, I favour challenging the canon. In my recommendations on politics I hold up books from which a reader can learn more about politics than from Aristotle or Machiavelli.

Take a charming book published in 1961, The Earl of Louisiana, by A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker. It's a study of Earl Long, governor of Louisiana and brother of Democratic Party populist Huey Long. Liebling writes:

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavour with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas -- stale and unprofitable.

So much like Joh for Canberra.

To a hardliner who wanted to stop Washington forcing racial desegregation on the south, Earl Long said: "What are you going to do now, Leander? The feds have got the atom bomb." No truer words have been spoken or written about the centripetal tendencies of modern federalism. And you won't learn that in Aristotle's Politics.

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this article was written by Bob Carr, published at www.theaustralian.news.com.au

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