NPR reported on some intriguing research.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/10/09/162401053/a-lively-mind-your-brain-on-jane-austen
Professor Natalie Phillips who specializes in literature and neuroscience and who is especially interested in the nature of distractibility given that it is a prominent theme in Jane Austen’s work, engaged in a study examining the difference in a reader’s mind when deeply immersed versus skimming.
“Phillips said she mainly expected to see differences in parts of the brain that regulate attention because that was the main difference between casual and focused reading. But in a neuroscientific plot twist, Phillips said preliminary results showed otherwise: “What’s been taking us by surprise in our early data analysis is how much the whole brain — global activations across a number of different regions — seems to be transforming and shifting between the pleasure and the close reading.” Phillips found that close reading activated unexpected areas: parts of the brain that are involved in movement and touch. It was as though readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they analyzed it.”
Deep in our animal mind, which on the deepest level works just like all other animal minds, feeling moved means feeling movement. This new research I believe is more confirmation of the phenomenon of emotional projection. Emotion is a calculus of motion because behavior on the most basic level is a transfer of momentum. Thus emotion piggy backs on the systems dedicated to physical motion, no matter how refined the intellectual activity. So just as our body/mind projects our physical center of gravity forward in order to calculate a trajectory of physical movement, our body/mind likewise projects our emotional center of gravity forward in order to calculate a trajectory of emotional movement. So when we feel moved, we actually do feel movement.
I predict that the issue of distractibility will be found to revolve around the circuitry dedicated to hunger as this is the emotional mechanism of fusion, i.e. the book is so good one can really “sink their teeth into it.”
Hunger is the feedback dynamic which associates the object of attraction with the physical center of gravity. The stronger the hunger the stronger the emotional weld. And when the written material is moving us because it is moving toward a point, it makes it very easy for the reader to locate the precise spot in the body/mind, the physical center of gravity as-a-point, the epicenter from whence the physical memory of movement that was triggered by the material, radiates throughout their body/mind as the feeling of movement.
