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
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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
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