People Died Reading a Novel—What Is the Mystery of the Brain Being Drawn into a Story?
I realized I was crying.
Even though the characters were fictional. Even though what was happening was a lie.
In 1774, a novel was banned.
It was in 1774 that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published
The Sorrows of Young Werther.
The protagonist, a young man named Werther, suffers from an unrequited love and
in the end, takes his own life with a pistol.
Immediately after this novel was published, a strange thing happened in Europe.
Young men began wearing the same blue coat and
yellow vest as Werther, and taking their own lives in the same way.
Beside their bodies, this novel was found.
The city of Leipzig banned the book.
Denmark followed suit.
The fear that "novels kill people"
swept through Europe at the time.
The brain does not completely distinguish between fiction and reality.
Modern psychologists call this "transportation."
A state of being "transported" into the world of a story.
According to research, readers who are deeply immersed
process the characters' emotions as their own.
When reading a scene about running, the brain's motor cortex reacts.
In sad scenes, the nerves corresponding to sadness are activated.
The brain does not completely distinguish between fiction and reality.
The young people who took their lives after reading Werther
felt that "this is my story."
Information that came in through text was processed as real emotion.
This is not a "weakness," but rather close to the specifications of the human brain.
What an anthropologist saw: "Campfires and stories"
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued as follows.
Stories told around ancient campfires
have bound groups together.
Stories of danger, stories of success, stories of heroes—
humans who possessed a brain capable of processing these as "experiences"
built stronger cooperative relationships and survived.
Being able to "become" a story might have been a human survival strategy.
Perhaps it was a human survival strategy.
The act of "crying over fiction" might be a manifestation of the "ability to understand others" that has been honed over tens of thousands of years.
When you cry over a made-up story, who is it that is being moved?
Can we cry just as much over a novel written by AI?
Or—even if we could cry, is that truly "immersion"?
When you are moved by a made-up story,
is it the work that is moving,
or is it you, the reader, who is being moved?
"Understanding a story" and
"being inside a story" might not be the same thing.
Is the brain's ability to process fiction as "reality"
something that only happens to beings with bodies and emotions?
Or—if we could reproduce the brain's processing patterns,
would the same thing happen?
Is it "Why do we cry over made-up stories?"
Is it "When we are immersed in a story, is it the brain or the heart that is moving?"
Is it "Can people truly be moved by a novel written by AI?"
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