NEUROBIOLOGICAL APPROACH OF READING

Resumo

Introduction: Neuroscience, in the past decades, has enabled a greater comprehension about the relationship between the fiction and central nervous system. Studies linked to psychology and neurology try to explain a regular act in the human being. Feelings aroused by reading a book. Literature Review: The brain, as it looks like, does not make much distinction between what is read and real life experiences. Thus, in both situations, the same areas of the brain are stimulated. In fact, this simulation gives the readers an experience unavailable outside the pages: the possibility to live the literary character. Mind reading, also named mind theory is a term used by cognitive psychologists to describe our capacity to explain the behavior of people in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs and wishes; the capacity of interpreting the behavior of people from real life – and by extension from literary characters. Scholars of this theory agree that this ability has developed in Pleistocene period, as an adaptive response to the challenge faced by our ancestries: to make sense the behavior of other people of their group, which includes from two to hundreds of individuals. Our tendency, thereby, to explain the observed behavior in terms of subjacent mind state looks like to be so easy and automatic, because our cognitive architecture evolved to daily learn and practice mind reading, since the beginning of consciousness. Conclusion: Therefore, aspects related to human cognition were important in biological evolution and maintenance of species. The brain, along the human evolution, has adapted to the environmental and social demand. Human interactions and its posterior interpretation of behavior enabled, thereby, that the reading of a book was understood.