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Ever Feel Like You Become Your Favorite Characters? Here’s Why
New research has discovered how the brain transports us into fictional realms
Every book lover knows that reading is a way of transporting ourselves into worlds other than our own. Through the pages, we can escape our troubles and pretend we’re living a different life than the one in which we’ve ended up.
Particularly given the events of the past year, books — to paraphrase that oft-quoted meme — give us somewhere to go when there’s nowhere to go.
Of course, it’s through the characters that we are able to enter those other realms, and all of us have at least one memorable fictional hero that we have identified particularly strongly with in our reading history.
My own fictional doppelganger (kind of)
For me there have been so many, from Jane in Jane Eyre to Darrell Rivers in Malory Towers (apparently I had a secret hankering to be sent away to boarding school that was never fulfilled). However, another especially big one was Elizabeth Wakefield in the Sweet Valley High series (no judgement, please).
It wasn’t exactly prize-winning literature, but Sweet Valley was my entry route into an exciting world of genre fiction as a pre-teen. It…
