Readers build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations, brain scans suggest

January 29, 2009

A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book - suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

"Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story," says Jeffrey M. Zacks, study co-author and director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.

The study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, is one of a series in which Zacks and colleagues use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track real-time brain activity as study participants read and process individual words and short stories.

Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.

"These results suggest that readers use perceptual and motor representations in the process of comprehending narrated activity, and these representations are dynamically updated at points where relevant aspects of the situation are changing," says Speer, now a research associate with The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) Mental Health Program in Boulder, Colo. "Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change."

In addition to Zacks, an associate professor of psychology in Arts and Sciences and of radiology in the School of Medicine at WUSTL, other co-authors for this study are Jeremy R. Reynolds, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Denver in Denver, Colo.; and Khena M. Swallow, a post-doctoral associate in psychology at the University of Minnesota. Reynolds, Swallow and Speer all graduated from the psychology doctoral program at WUSTL in the last several years.

Reading, one of the most important skills human beings can acquire, has been difficult to study using fMRI because researchers seldom have access to expensive scanning equipment for long periods of time. Reading long passages of text also poses challenges because participants must remain very still for the scans to be effective. In an effort to minimize eye movements, participants are immobilized within the brain-scanning device and presented with text one-word-at-a-time on an adjacent computer screen.

Previous research has shown that when people read isolated words or phrases involving vivid visual or motor contents, brain activity in sensory and motor brain regions specifically related to those contents increased. But this result might not be typical of normal reading - in the previous studies there was no story to try to understand, and participants sometimes had to make an explicit judgment about each word or phrase. In this study, Speer and colleagues used fMRI to look for evidence of mental simulation during the reading of extended stories. Each participant read four stories of less than 1500 words excerpted from a simple, 1940s-era book about the daily activities of a young boy. Participants were shown text passages on a computer screen that displayed one word at a time; reading all four stories took most participants about 40 minutes.

The researchers had carefully coded the stories so that they knew when important features of the story were changing. The features had been chosen based on previous studies of narrative reading, and were known to be important for comprehension. The researchers hypothesized that some brain regions would increase at several different feature changes, but that other brain regions would be selectively activated by only one feature change. This is what was found.

For example, changes in the objects a character interacted with (e.g., "pulled a light cord") were associated with increases in a region in the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Changes in characters' locations (e.g., "went through the front door into the kitchen") were associated with increases in regions in the temporal lobes that are selectively activate when people view pictures of spatial scenes.

Overall, the data supported the view that readers construct mental simulations of events when reading stories.

The Speer et al. paper extends results reported by this group previously in Psychological Science. In the previous study, the researchers asked readers to divide the stories into meaningful events after reading them in the MRI scanner. The researchers then asked which parts of the brain increased in activity at event boundaries. The mental simulation results reported here line up strikingly with those regions. This suggests that readers construct a mental simulation as they read, and then divide that simulation into meaningful events when important features change.

Washington University in St. Louis

---

---

	Brain Imaging: Case Review Series, 2e by Laurie A. Loevner MD (Author), David M. Yousem MD MBA (Author) This volume in the best-selling "Case Review" series uses hundreds of case studies to challenge your knowledge of a full range of topics in brain imaging. With 170 brand new cases, new coverage of MRA, CTA, MR spectroscopy and multi-detectors and over 600 brilliant images, this is your ideal concise, economical, and user-friendly tool for self assessment in this specialty!Utilizes case studies organized into "Opening Round," "Fair Game," and "Challenge" sections, so you can test yourself at varying difficulty levels. Provides at-a-glance review/self-testing of brain imaging cases ideal for preparing for the boards in brain imaging, the CAQ exam for neuroradiology or for the general radiologist ready for re-certification. Mimics the official exam formats and daily practice...
	Diagnostic Imaging: Brain: Published by Amirsys by Anne G. Osborn (Author), Karen L. Salzman (Author), A. James Barkovich (Author) In this Second Edition of the bestselling Diagnostic Imaging: Brain, each "original" diagnosis has been revised to include the most recent information, updated references, and new image galleries. Moreover, the book features more than 100 new diagnoses. You'll find thousands of new images, all crisply annotated to reinforce the most important points. Richly colored graphics pop off the page, and both typical and variant findings are lavishly illustrated in more than 300 diagnoses. This updated volume will surely become the new standard reference textbook for neuroradiologists, general radiologists, neurologists, and neurosurgeons. A new companion eBook offers the fully searchable expanded text, hundreds of additional images, and extensive linked references....
	What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite by David DiSalvo (Author) Foreword by Wray Herbert Author of On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hardwired Habits Former editor in chief of Psychology Today Regular contributor to Science, Scientific American, and Science NewsWhy do we routinely choose options that don't meet our short-term needs and undermine our long-term goals? Why do we willingly expose ourselves to temptations that undercut our hard-fought progress to overcome addictions? Why are we prone to assigning meaning to statistically common coincidences? Why do we insist we're right even when evidence contradicts us?In What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, science writer David DiSalvo reveals a remarkable paradox: what your brain wants is frequently not what your brain needs. In fact, much of what makes our...
	The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging by Paul M. Matthews (Author), Jeffrey McQuain (Author), Diane Ackerman (Author) More than 400 years after they were first written, Shakespeare's plays still offer a stunning glimpse into the motivations, desires, and deviancies of man. His characters are caught in situations modern readers can sympathize with, and his themes—love, family relations, adultery, power, treachery—are as relevant now as they were then. Surprisingly, another aspect of the Bard's work that has withstood the test of time is his understanding of the brain. The Bard on the Brain is a marvelous combination of close readings of Shakespeare and the most current neurological research that together demonstrate how impulses and actions originate in the brain. Paul Matthews here shows us the center-stage role of the brain in famous scenes from Shakespeare's plays. With stunning color brain...
	Molecular Imaging of the Brain: Using Sodium Multi-Quantum Coherence and Diagnostics of Brain Disorders (Series in BioEngineering) by M. M. Kaila (Author), Rakhi Kaila (Author) This book examines multi-quantum magnetic resonance imaging methods and the diagnostics of brain disorders. It consists of two Parts. The part I is initially devoted towards the basic concepts of the conventional single quantum MRI techniques. It is supplemented by the basic knowledge required to understand multi-quantum MRI. Practical illustrations are included both on recent developments in conventional MRI and the MQ-MRI. This is to illustrate the connection between theoretical concepts and their scope in the clinical applications. The Part II initially sets out the basic details about quadrupole charge distribution present in certain nuclei and their importance about the functions they perform in our brain. Some simplified final mathematical expressions are included to illustrate...
	Fundamentals of Functional Brain Imaging: A Guide to the Methods and their Applications to Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience (Studies on Neuropsychology, Neurology and Cognition) by Andrew C. Papanicolaou (Author) This generously illustrated guide to functional imaging responds to the needs of non-specialists, professionals and students of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, behavioral neurology, and epistemology.  It enables them to understand the basic principles of the highly specialized and constantly evolving imaging technologies and to assess for themselves the contribution of these technologies to their respective fields. Fundamentals of Functional Brain Imaging will be useful for practitioners and advanced students in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology, residents in psychiatry and neurology, as well as the interested general public.
	Brain imaging studies of intelligence and creativity: what is the picture for education?(Report): An article from: Roeper Review by Richard J. Haier (Author), Rex E. Jung (Author) This digital document is an article from Roeper Review, published by The Roeper School on July 1, 2008. The length of the article is 8452 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. From the author: The goal of this article is to summarize current brain research on intelligence and creativity that may be relevant to education in the near future. Five issues are addressed: (a) Why is there a neuroscience interest in intelligence? (b) Can intelligence be located in the brain? (c) Why are some brains smarter than others? (d) What do we know about creativity and the brain? and (e) Can information about an individual's brain structure...
	A brain imaging study of the choice procedure [An article from: Games and Economic Behavior] by A. Rustichini (Author), J. Dickhaut (Author), P. Ghirardato (Author), Smith (Author) This digital document is a journal article from Games and Economic Behavior, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. Description: We study the behavior of subjects facing choices between certain, risky, and ambiguous lotteries. Subjects' choices are consistent with the economic theories modeling ambiguity aversion. Our results support the conjecture that subjects face choice tasks as an estimation of the value of the lotteries, and that the difficulty of the choice is an important explanatory variable (in addition to risk and ambiguity aversion). The brain imaging data suggest that such estimation is of an approximate nature when the...
	Handling Digital Brains: A Laboratory Study of Multimodal Semiotic Interaction in the Age of Computers (Inside Technology) by Morana Alac (Author) The results of fMRI brain scanning require extensive analysis in the laboratory. In Handling Digital Brains, Morana Alac shows that fMRI researchers do not sit passively staring at computer screens but actively involve their bodies in laboratory practice. Discussing fMRI visuals with colleagues, scientists animate the scans with gestures, and talk as they work with computers. Alač argues that to understand how digital scientific visuals take on meaning we must consider their dynamic coordination with gesture, speech, and working hands. These multimodal actions, she suggests, are an essential component of digital scientific visuals. A semiotician trained in...
	Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina (Author) See how the brain works while using it in the process of reading this book! Most of us have no idea what's really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know - like that physical activity boosts your brain power. How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget - and so important to repeat new information? Is it true that men and women have different brains? In Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist, shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule - what scientists know for sure...