Characters in novels, movies, and other fictions can seem quite real (we root for one and boo another, for example, and cry sometimes when one of them dies). Yet for all that, we can easily distinguish them from real people, people that we know personally. But how do you know that your mother is real, for example, but Scarlett O’Hara is not?
An ingenious recent fMRI study compared brain activity in cases where people contemplated scenarios involving fictional characters, famous people that they didn’t know personally, and friends or family members. Participants had to determine the plausibility of actions like dreaming about a fictional character (possible), talking with a fictional character (impossible) or having dinner with a real person (possible).
Two brain areas appeared to be involved in the activity of distinguishing flesh-and-blood people from the purely mental constructs that are fictional characters: the anterior medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. These are parts of the brain’s default network, which kicks in when we’re not doing anything in particular and our minds go wandering over an internal landscape; both areas are believed to be important in self-referential thought and the recall of autobiographical memories. These brain areas were most active in the tasks involving friends and family, moderately active in tasks involving famous people who were not personally known, and least active in tasks involving a fictional character. The idea is that perhaps you know your mother is real because your brain codes her as being more personally relevant to you than a fictional character is.
The paper is available on PLoS ONE: Reality = Relevance? Insights from Spontaneous Modulations of the Brain’s Default Network when Telling Apart Reality from Fiction, Anne Abraham and D. Yves von Craman. It’s got lots of interesting background, and some fascinating material on the possible relevance of this work and ways it could be extended. I’d love to know, for example, how particularly well-known and loved fictional characters fall on the spectrum of brain activity, and also what an writer’s brain looks like when it’s contemplating characters it has created. Meanwhile, it’s time for me to immerse myself in a fictional world and a hot bath.
I also immediately wondered if there would be more activity for very well loved fictional characters. I also wondered what the results would look like for a socially disordered individual who was more immersed in a fictional world than the real one.