Usually, books are presented as an antidote to a TV-controlled populace. But now a new neuroscience study reveals that books control people’s minds and emotions in exactly the same way television does.
A group of researchers In The U.S. and the Netherlands peered into people’s brains using fMRI machines while those people were doing a series of three tasks: reading about something disgusting, watching images of something disgusting, and actually tasting something disgusting.
We found voxels in the anterior Insula and adjacent frontal operculum to be involved in all three modalities of disgust, suggesting that simulation in the context of social perception and mental imagery of disgust share a common neural substrates. Using effective connectivity, this shared region however was found to be embedded in distinct functional circuits during the three modalities, suggesting why observing, imagining and experiencing an emotion feels so different.
Bad science reporting … as usual
I absolutely abhor bad science reporting. This study in no way shows “that books control people’s minds and emotions in exactly the same way television does.” That simply cannot be posited from this study. At best, as one of the commentors at io9 said, it can claim that however we experience disgust lights up the same regions of the brain.
Certainly reading “manipulates” our brains and our emotions. But exactly in the same way? That is simply asinine. There is too much research showing how the processing of text and images (and oral story, etc.) are processed differently by the brain. But once something has triggered the emotional circuitry then of course it is “the same.” I seriously doubt we have circuitry for text-based emotions and for image-based emotions and for oral-based emotions ….
People who report on science like this should be taken out and publicly flogged until the general populace can figure this out for themselves. I truly hope there is a special level of hell for “reporters” such as this. And if the scientists made these claims themselves then I’ll help construct the special level just for them.
In no way does text and image “control our minds and emotions in the same way.” But once the emotions or some such other behavior is triggered then it (most likely) is the same. Duh!
I can control your mind with my smell…
Taste and smell are related senses, so I’m guessing this might work.
If I could control your mind with either disgusting images, disgusting words or disgusting smells, I’d pick smells because I create plenty enough every day. Hell, I should probably already control the world.
Come here, pull my finger, then open that bank vault.