When you are absorbed in reading fiction, several areas in your brain "light up." And not just the centers for reading and understanding words. Also activated are centers for the sensory and motor activities described in the story. In other words, you are in some way experiencing the story vicariously.
We know this because of recent research into the brain through functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. In one study, among the first to show our brains on literature, Michigan State University professor Natalie Phillips examined scans of Stanford University graduate students while they skimmed or perused Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park.
(A brief digression. Skim and peruse are opposites, or antonyms. I have seen the two words conflated in recent usage.)
When the students read the text closely, their brains showed increased blood flow to the regions controlling sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch, depending on the story, or to the specific region of the motor cortex controlling that body movement.
Meet you on the holodeck, anyone?
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