1/29/2009 PERMALINK
Digitally imaging the brains of fiction readers, even as fiction goes digital to survive
A brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book -- suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life ... more

In her living room in Hokkaido, a young woman sits punching the keys of her keitai (cell phone). The voices of those around her don't seem to break her concentration. Like other girls text messaging, surfing the internet and gaming, Kiki is as skilled as she is serious with her keitai. But unlike them, she just happens to be writing a novel. The 24-year-old housekeeper casually entered the competition for the Japan Keitai Novel Award in October 2008 -- and won. Along with the Grand Prize honors came 2 million yen cash and a deal with Tokyo-based Starts Publishing to print her novel, I, Girlfriend, in traditional book form. By starting each sentence on a new line, kiki captured the choppy conversational rhythm of cell phone-using Japanese teens in a way traditional literature has not. Literary critic Genichiro Takahashi calls the work "the first masterpiece of the keitai novel genre." ... more