How does reading fiction differ from watching a show or those videos on social media platforms?
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Social media gives you a cue, a reference, or a simple stimulus to draw you in and entertain you. Same thing with TV, it makes the image for you, or it call back to something you already know.
Fiction introduces stories, characters, sprawling landscapes, and living, breathing ideas all at once. All of these are inherently interconnected. Your mind is constantly filling in gaps, making images, searching for patterns, making voices, sounds, smells, and so much more as you take it in. Social media can do this too, but not always to this extent. It’s grounded in reality or memes, while fiction tries to immerse you in something else entirely.
TV is like fiction, but without the mental task of reading. In that way it does use very different parts of your brain, reading fiction directly forces you to use your conscious brain networks, while watching TV or simply taking in stimulus allows you to slip in to resting “bored” networks. So in these ways, reading does activate different parts of the brain.
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