Fiction Is Indispensable to Life’s Journey |
Fiction offers us the places and people we need in our lives.
Fiction vicariously gives us an escape from where we are.
Fiction has the potential to make a complex and at times difficult world easier to be in.
We never grow tired of loving and needing the fiction we find in books and movies. As children, we beg for one more book before we give over to sleep or ask to hear the favorite, over and over again. As adults we continue to trade in sleep to finish the chapter, see the end of the show, binge-watch the series or re-watch favorites on a host of devices. Why?
We love fiction and we need fiction. We learn from fiction, we upload our imaginations to access fiction, we feel our way through fiction, we connect and we find ourselves and others through fiction. It expands our social cognition—an understanding of the feelings and situations of others (Rezende and Shigaeff, 2023).
Why Do We Hold on to Fiction In a Way We Never Remember Facts?
Fiction Transports Us
Psychologists Melanie Green and Tim Brock, in their Transportation Imagery Model (2013), suggest that we are “transported” by stories. We suspend vigilance to inaccuracies, reason, time, and place. Narrative Persuasion (belief change) occurs to the extent that the evoked images are activated by psychological transportation to a state in which a reader becomes absorbed in the narrative world – for a time, leaving the real world behind. We are moved emotionally and neurophysiologically. It’s not a matter of ignoring the false notes; we don’t even see them. Green and Brock argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” The more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them. They propose that when we are highly absorbed........