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using snapshots of the brain at work to explore the mechanics of reading

Blakey Vermeule, an associate professor of English at Stanford, is examining theory of mind from a different perspective. She starts from the assumption that evolution had a hand in our love of fiction, and then goes on to examine the narrative technique known as “free indirect style,” which mingles the character’s voice with the narrator’s. Indirect style enables readers to inhabit two or even three mind-sets at a time.

“To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at cheaters, and delight when they are punished

“but that fiction gives us insight into evolution.”

it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting.

The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy‘s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream.

we continued to  reassure one another that War and Peace or À La Recherche du Temps Perdu were Very Important in some vague way.  (This tension has produced an entire literature about the value of reading Proust that is now more widely read than Proust‘s actual oeuvre.)

because the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we’d been emptily praising all these years, the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture is now becoming clear.

William Sayoran once remarked, “Everybody has got to die … but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Luddism is a social version of that, where people are encouraged to believe that change is inevitable, except, perhaps, this time.

Luddism is bad for society because it misdirects people’s energy and wastes their time.

our older habits of consumption weren’t virtuous, they were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access.