Neuroscience explains the astonishing benefits of reading books like a writer

Neuroscience explains the astonishing benefits of reading books like a writer

Todd Brison

What good writing does to your brain

The best writers know how piece together certain concepts and information in a way that can hack into different parts of a reader’s brain.
A 2006 study published in NeuroImage asked “participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.”

Whenever participants read words like “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex (the part of your brain that processes “smell”) lit up like fireworks on the fMRI machine. Words like “velvet” activated the sensory cortex (which processes “feelings”) of the brain. Researchers concluded that in certain cases, the brain can make no distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life.

Good writers know how to choose the right words.

Researchers concluded that in certain cases, the brain can make no distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life.

This reminds me of a comment made by a radio listener, as to why they preferred it to the TV. "The Pictures Are Better on Radio".

This reminds me of a comment made by a radio listener, as to why they preferred it to the TV. "The Pictures Are Better on Radio".

I would agree, I've been getting myself back into fiction writing and have had some people ask me if I'd do audio books. I don't really like them because I lose out on what I see as literary procedural generation. Writing certain descriptions as pure metaphors that require lots of different associations in a small amount of words to understand. Example, describing someone's face looking  "like they'd just had a triple shot of expresso and a large cinnamon bun at 3am"

If the readers brain isn't doing all the processing itself then it just won't generate the same picture.