Can your reader get into your mind?

[Twiggy]

Mind-melding apparently happens when stories are listened to - http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... d-too.html - I wonder about when they're read silently.

[QBall]

Especially if it is in Russian!
I got that retort from a brainwave.

[nickyrichfield]

That's an interesting article. Just a guess, but I would think how far the reader goes towards the writer's mindset would depend on how fluently they can read - if the process is instinctive, or they have to work at any stage of it.

Then again, thinking about what my mind is doing when I write a story - it's not at all the same as when I say in person to somebody, 'Here, listen to what happened to me on the way home this morning...' and more or less relive the experience as I tell it. In writing, I stop and think about which information to give first. I backtrack and change my mind about details of the action. When editing, I change words and suppress sections, or change their order. The reader wouldn't want to be in on that lot!

[PDN]

It's a shame they didn't add the story that was told to the listener. I wanted to know whether any of the listeners admitted to their mind drifting away from the story. How would you measure that? And if you were then given the same story in written form: whether you brain patterns would behave in the same way, and would you adhere to the comma's and fullstops or breaks in speech? Imagine if you were a speedy reader! I wonder what would happen if you were deaf and could only read the story, instead of being told it, whether the brain pattern on the scanner, would show the same result? The Russian may me smile.

Nastrovia!
pdn

[nickyrichfield]

I can relate to the thing of brainwaves getting in synch when people are present, in company with one another, and all bound up in the same process. In a co-operation-building exercise before starting work on a theatre piece once, the group leader had us all doing movement and sound together, then moved on to a guided visualization, while we all continued moving around the room randomly, humming quietly. The pictures he described were really vivid in my mind, and then I found I was seeing the next thing BEFORE he said it.

[Twiggy]

So it's a bit like telepathy?

[nickyrichfield]

That's certainly what it felt like, as an effect. (Brilliant, by the way!) I'm just making the assumption that the cause, or at least the simultaneous happening, would have been all our brainwaves coinciding.

[Twiggy]

Some non-fiction reading I've done I think is like this. If you link with the author's mindset you can understand it, where on a different occasion you have difficulty. Hard to say if it applies to fiction. Is getting totally absorbed in a story a sign?

[nickyrichfield]

I don't know that I'd agree that understanding a non-fiction text depends on linking to the author. After all, the author won't necessarily be thinking about the subject matter you're studying right then. He might be washing his socks, chatting up a bird at a rock concert, or working on his third book down the line from what you're reading. So I'd be more inclined to think it was being in the right frame of mind to concentrate, and to be open to making connections to what you already know in that area of knowledge.

Getting absorbed in a fiction story, I think, works by the reader voluntarily closing off real-life matters, and therefore depending entirely on the text to prompt thoughts and imagery.

[Twiggy]

That has to be right.