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Gregory S. Berns. 1 Department of Economics, Center for Neuropolicy, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
Kristina Blaine. 1 Department of Economics, Center for Neuropolicy, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
Michael J. Prietula. 2 Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
Brandon E. Pye. 1 Department of Economics, Center for Neuropolicy, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
Address correspondence to: Gregory S. Berns, Department of Economics, Center for Neuropolicy, Emory University, 36 Eagle Row, Atlanta, GA 30322, E-mail: [email protected]
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.- William Styron, Conversations with William Styron.
Most people can identify books that have made great impressions on them and, subjectively, changed the way they think. Some can even point to a book that has changed their life. Stephen King, for example, said that Lord of the Flies changed his life, "because it is both a story with a message and because it is a great tale of adventure." Joyce Carol Oates pointed to Alice in Wonderland as "the book that most influenced her imaginative life." It seems plausible that if something as simple as a book can leave the impression that one's life has been changed, then perhaps it is powerful enough to cause changes in brain function and structure. Here, we test this possibility by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track changes in resting-state brain activity on a daily basis over a period of 3 weeks, during which individuals read a complete novel.
Novels are stories, and stories are complicated objects of communication (Abbott, 2008).* Although several linguistic and literary theories describe what constitutes a story, neurobiological research has just begun to elucidate brain networks that are active when processing stories. To date, these studies have focused on the immediate response to short stories (Mar, 2011). In other words, current neurobiological theory of stories describes the network of brain regions that is active and presumably responsible for cognitive processing of stories while they are being consumed. While active tasks have traditionally been used to identify functional networks within the brain, resting-state fMRI has become a common tool to identify consistent patterns of correlated activity, termed resting-state networks (RSNs) (Biswal et al., 1995, 2010; Kelly et al.,...