The importance of imagination and subjective knowledge: The evolution of art and religion as symbolic representations of feelings, experiences, and beliefs

Religion and art have been incredibly important in human evolution but, we argue, are often not taken seriously as an important source of knowledge. In this article, we propose that the arts and religions are symbolic systems that capture subjective knowledge, or knowledge about the world that is specific to human experience or the human condition, both concerning the self (existential subjective knowledge) and others (social subjective knowledge). Forms of this knowledge comprise feelings, experiences, and beliefs, which can arise from naturally occurring experiences or can be induced through religious rituals and artistic performances. Subjective knowledge is processed through subjective cognition – experiential or intuitive thinking, narrative processing, and meaning-making. Individual differences in subjective cognition are proposed to lie in absorption, or the propensity of individuals to allow for a state of the experiential, more porous self, through reduced boundaries of the rational, bounded self. This in turn allows for an immersive focus on sensory inputs, and becoming connected to something bigger than oneself, a state that is especially conducive to providing meaning and new perspectives with regards to the human condition. Together, forms of subjective knowledge make up symbolic systems that feed into overarching subjective knowledge systems, or cultures and worldviews. Thus, religion and art has allowed for subjective knowledge to become represented in symbols and artefacts, which renders the subjective knowledge concrete, memorable and shareable.

Reading Minds, Reading Stories: Social-Cognitive Abilities Affect the Linguistic Processing of Narrative Viewpoint

Although various studies have shown that narrative reading draws on social-cognitive abilities, not much is known about the precise aspects of narrative processing that engage these abilities. We hypothesized that the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint—expressed by elements that provide access to the inner world of characters—might play an important role in engaging social-cognitive abilities. Using eye tracking, we studied the effect of lexical markers of perceptual, cognitive, and emotional viewpoint on eye movements during reading of a 5,000-word narrative. Next, we investigated how this relationship was modulated by individual differences in social-cognitive abilities. Our results show diverging patterns of eye movements for perceptual viewpoint markers on the one hand, and cognitive and emotional viewpoint markers on the other. Whereas the former are processed relatively fast compared to non-viewpoint markers, the latter are processed relatively slow. Moreover, we found that social-cognitive abilities impacted the processing of words in general, and of perceptual and cognitive viewpoint markers in particular, such that both perspective-taking abilities and self-reported perspective-taking traits facilitated the processing of these markers. All in all, our study extends earlier findings that social cognition is of importance for story reading, showing that individual differences in social-cognitive abilities are related to the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint.

Functional Brain Connectivity During Narrative Processing Relates to Transportation and Story Influence

Engaging with narratives involves a complex array of cognitive and affective processes. These processes make stories persuasive in ways that standard arguments are not, though the underlying reasons for this remain unclear. Transportation theory proposes a potential explanation for this: narratives are processed in a way which makes individuals feel immersed in the world of a story, which in turn leads people to resonate emotionally with the events of the story. Recent fMRI studies have shown that the posterior medial cortex (PMC) and anterior insula (AI) play important roles in understanding the meaning of stories and experiencing the feelings they produce. In this study, we aimed to explore the AI’s and PMC’s role in narrative processing by measuring their functional connectivity with the rest of the brain during story listening, and how connectivity changes as a function of narrative transportation and the persuasiveness of the story. We analyzed data from 36 right-handed subjects who listened to two stories, obtained from podcasts, inside the fMRI scanner. After the scan, subjects were asked a series of questions, including a measure of how transported into the story they felt, how likely they would be to donate to causes related to the messages of the stories. We used searchlight multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to classify functional connectivity maps using seeds in both the AI and PMC and to compare these maps between participants who differed in transportation and prosocial intention. We found that connectivity to various regions successfully distinguished between high and low ratings on each of these behavioral measures with accuracies over 75%. However, only one pattern of connectivity was consistent across both stories: PMC-inferior frontal gyrus connectivity successfully distinguished high and low ratings of narrative transportation in both stories. All other findings were not consistent across stories. Instead, we found that patterns of connectivity may relate more to the specific content of the story rather than to a universal way in which narratives are processed.

There and Back Again? Exploring the Real-Time Cognitive Journey of Narrative Transportation

Prior research has produced seemingly conflicting indications of whether or not audience members who are transported into a narrative leave themselves and the real world behind. This study proposes that a dynamic perspective can help resolve that conflict. Both traditional static post-exposure and real-time dynamic measures were used to examine four cognitive processes: attention, presence, self-referencing, and real world-referencing. Participants ( N = 118) were randomly assigned to view one of two television dramas. They provided continuous rating responses during viewing, as well as post-exposure measures of the overall viewing experience. Post-exposure measures indicated that self and real world-referencing were strongly positively correlated with transportation. The dynamic approach to understanding narrative processing, while exploratory in nature, likewise indicated links between the self, the real world, and the narrative world. Presence in the narrative predicted real world-referencing, and self-referencing predicted attention to the narrative, suggesting that when audience members link story content to their own lives, transportation may be enhanced rather than diminished. Strengths, limitations and future directions are discussed.

Relating the Past with the Present: Information Integration and Segregation during Ongoing Narrative Processing

This study examined how the brain dynamically updates event representations by integrating new information over multiple minutes while segregating irrelevant input. A professional writer custom-designed a narrative with two independent storylines, interleaving across minute-long segments (ABAB). In the last (C) part, characters from the two storylines meet and their shared history is revealed. Part C is designed to induce the spontaneous recall of past events, upon the recurrence of narrative motifs from A/B, and to shed new light on them. Our fMRI results showed storyline-specific neural patterns, which were reinstated (i.e., became more active) during storyline transitions. This effect increased along the processing timescale hierarchy, peaking in the default mode network. Similarly, the neural reinstatement of motifs was found during Part C. Furthermore, participants showing stronger motif reinstatement performed better in integrating A/B and C events, demonstrating the role of memory reactivation in information integration over intervening irrelevant events.