This Is Your Brain on Culture

Transported by a film, tv, or story, we believe or at least we do not disbelieve in what we are perceiving even when it is obviously not true. This is totally unadaptive behavior, almost a miniature psychosis. You cannot explain it evolutionarily. People have been using Coleridge's phrase, willing suspension of disbelief, to describe this phenomenon for more than two centuries. It describes very well the feelings we have in situations that Coleridge could never have imagined, like Spider-Man. But to explain the phenomenon, we need modern psychology and neuroscience.

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