BiblioAddict

On reading books, watching movies, and drunken men:

So here’s something that avid readers will probably not be surprised by: according to a new study, reading affects the brain the same way that watching a movie does.  The study compared the reactions of participants to watching something gross as opposed to reading something gross:

“We placed our participants in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while we first showed our subject short 3s movie clips of an actor sipping from a cup and then looking disgusted,” said the University of Groningen’s Christian Keysers in a press release.

“Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios; for instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth. Finally, we measured their brain activity while the participants tasted unpleasant solutions in the scanner.”

I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.  Oh the many times I’ve said, “It’s the same thing,” to someone who said they preferred movies to books.  A boring book is just as agonizing as a boring movie and an exciting book is just as thrilling as an exciting movie.

Still, I’d love to see the scientists expand their study to cover a wider range of emotions just to give their argument a little more weight.