What happens in our brain when reading a novel

The reality of the summer break, and the fact that we have been inundated by factual literature, invite one to want to dive into the fiction of novels and “discover Mediterranean”, as Unamuno used to say — even more so now, in the pandemic, than it has us captured in the harshness of its reality.

Among my recent dips, are those of having read the six macabre stories of PD James

sprinkled with “the sweet scent of blood” of its author's ink, and

Victoria Ocampo's

—

captures the magic of first-person transposition, so that I myself “felt the vertigo which invariably gives us the past when we look at it from the growing tower of years.

I picked up the phone and called the St. Regis where Cocteau was staying.

We met for tea there that afternoon.

I arrived.

I went up to his apartment.

How out of place I found that Frenchman, a precious luxury object on the Rue de la Paix, in that setting!

We look at each other.

We embraced (would we think of the same?) As after a shipwreck ”-.

Why do we read novels?

How to understand the attachment they cause us?

We are constantly learning to read, comprehension and enjoyment of reading are a lifelong learning process.

In his article 'Books That Influenced Me', published in

in 1887, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of

He says that the most decisive and most lastingly influential books are the novels, because “they do not impose on the reader a dogma that later turns out to be inaccurate, nor do they teach him any lesson that must later be unlearned.

They repeat, restructure, clarify life's lessons;

they disengage us from ourselves, forcing us to become familiar with our neighbor;

and they show the fabric of the experience, not as it appears before our eyes, but singularly transformed, since our monstrous and voracious ego has been momentarily suppressed ”.

Besides being a source of pleasure, fiction allows the reader to simulate and learn from the fictional experience. According to Keith Oatley, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and specialist in the psychology of fiction, one of the uses of simulation is that, to train yourself in how to fly an airplane, it is useful to spend time in a flight simulator . However, practice in a real plane is essential, most of the time in the air not much happens. From the safe environment of a simulator, it is possible to face a wide range of experiences and rehearse how to respond to critical situations - and the skills learned are transferred when flying an airplane. In the same way, by engaging in fictional simulations, what we have learned is transferred to our daily interactions.

His research confirms what Stevenson said: by indirectly sharing the subtleties and tribulations of the story, and by making inferences about the development of the plot, the reader expands his empathy. That is, we align our emotions and thoughts with those of the characters. With FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) imaging it has been found that when one reads sentences that describe an action, such as, "going up the stairs", the reading leads to the simulation of the motor and emotional content in the brain, and it is accompanied by changes in the brain regions that provoke the action, as if the reader were doing it.

Our unconscious is an indefatigable reader who is continually learning — whoever reads, interprets from his unconscious. What is at stake is that, to what is written, we give a different reading than what the work originally meant. Understood in this way, it is a way of interpreting — it is a reading of the differences that inhabit language. In his essay The Family Romances, Freud speculates that each one is both the author and the hero of a "family novel," of which it could be said that we are the only reader. This private work, in which we tell ourselves stories derived from unconscious fantasies, constitutes a necessary condition for life in society.

How should a book be read? What is the correct way to do it? They are so many and so varied. “To read a book well, you have to read it as if you were writing it. Start by not sitting on the stand with the judges, stand on the bench, with the accused. Be his co-worker, become his accomplice ”, recommends Virginia Woolf in a conference given in 1926 to the students of a school in Kent. “You can think what you want about reading, but no one is going to make laws about it. Here, in this room, between books, more than anywhere else, we breathe an air of freedom. Here, simple and learned, man and woman are equal. Because, nevertheless, reading seems a simple thing - a mere matter of knowing the alphabet - in fact, it is so complex,that it is doubtful that anyone knows what it really is ".

David Dorenbaum