Virtual reality between the ears

I’m reading Adam Bede, by George Eliot, and I’ve noticed that she opens several chapters with an invitation to the reader to view a scene as she describes it. I think at one point she even has readers peeking through a window to see inside a house. This invitation to enter another world, whether explicit or implicit, is one of the chief allures of fiction for me. A recent fMRI study reveals some of the brain activity going on when we immerse ourselves in a written narrative. It’s an active process, with different brain areas coming into play to mirror what the characters in the narrative are doing. Our minds are evidently doing something akin to what Eliot describes: experiencing a virtual world to some degree as if it were real. This article from PhysOrg.com describes the work. The paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, but I haven’t been able to find a citation yet.