Neuroimaged

Abstract

Literary scholars have long known that reading can create worlds, make us feel, and even change our minds. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience reveal the regions and networks of the brain that facilitate these reading processes. Using several studies of literature, poetry, and music conducted at the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition lab at Michigan State University, this chapter demonstrates how we can bring together literary and neuroscientific understandings of reading to better grasp how we read, including how we read differently. In particular, fMRI allows us to see how our brain activity and engagement with literature while reading changes dramatically over time, and how our feelings and interpretations emerge dynamically in the moment-to-moment reading of the text. Beyond helping us understand the processes of reading better, reading in a scanner also presents an opportunity to rethink what reading is and looks like in an increasingly digital world.