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Books are every bit as exciting as movies, say scientists

The next time someone tries to tell you that movies are a more visceral, exciting medium than literature, you can counter their arguments by pointing to a new scientific study that has just been released in the Netherlands.

According to Science Daily, three scientists at the University of Groningen decided to compare what happens in our brains when we view the facial expressions of other people with what happens in our brains when we read about emotional experiences. The scientist they quote, Christian Keysers, sounds like a very intense fellow, and we like to imagine that he looks and sounds something like the German filmmaker Werner Herzog:

“We placed our participants in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while we first showed our subject short [...] movie clips of an actor sipping from a cup and then looking disgusted,” said Christian Keysers. “Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios; for instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth. Finally, we measured their brain activity while the participants tasted unpleasant solutions in the scanner.”

“Our striking result,” said Keysers, “is that in all three cases, the same location of the anterior insula lit up. The anterior insula is the part of the brain that is the heart of our feeling of disgust. Patients who have damage to the insula, because of a brain infection for instance, lose this capacity to feel disgusted. If you give them sour milk, they would drink it happily and say it tastes like soda.”

Prof. Keysers continued, “What this means is that whether we see a movie or read a story, the same thing happens: we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted – and that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through.”