What happens in the brain when reading a good book, like say, Harry Potter?

What happens in the brain when we're reading a good book and we get lost in it?

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What happens when you read a good book? More specifically, what happens to your brain when you are immersed in a good read? These questions are being discussed in the world of psychology, reports Fast Co Design in an article posted on Nov. 7. Using passages from the Harry Potter books, psychologists have documented what happens to the brain when totally immersed in a good passage.

Book lovers know that often being absorbed in a good book means that you lose track of time. There was also news trending not that far back that said reading books (especially fiction) might even make you a better person. In any case, reading is an immersive activity that can activate the senses and emotions with the running passages of words.

Fast Co Design’s article reports that a group of psychologists from the Free University of Berlin aim to discover how reading affects the neurobiology of the brain. They have paired the activity of reading passages from books with neuroimaging in what they call the first attempts to “understand the neural mechanisms of immersive reading experience.”

The psychologists involved, led by Chun-Ting Hsu, have published their findings in the journal NeuroReport. Their findings relate what happened when they put test subjects into a brain scanner while reading four-line sections of the Harry Potter books. Passages chosen either evoked emotions of fear or merely advanced the plot of the story. Participants rated which passages immersed them more, with results heavily leaning towards those which induced fear.

We can all guess which passages held the readers more. Hsu and his collaborators found that those survey results matched up directly with what the psychologists saw in the scanner. “In the middle cingulate gyrus area of the brain [or the area of the brain that is considered a part of the “empathy network”], Hsu and company detected a much stronger link between immersion ratings and neural activity for the fearful passages than for the neutral ones,” reported Fast Co Design.

There is a hypothesis in psychology called the “fiction feeling hypothesis” that states that readers’ empathy networks become more active when emotional parts of a story are read, especially when emotions evoke responses of suspense or fear. The study’s findings are but a small step towards exploring this hypothesis more in depth. Others in the field have called the research findings “a bit underwhelming” but definitely a step in the right direction. More research is needed with more focus on immersion (four lines is hardly enough material in which to get lost) and other kinds of text, when read, need to be tested, even the neutral passages. In the study mentioned above, only one part of the empathy network was triggered and others still need to be considered.

*originally published on the now defunct Examiner.com