If you have followed me so far, I thank you for your patience.  So far we have seen: 1) with literary works, even the humble comic book, we suspend disbelief; that is, 2) in order to comprehend, we believe; we have poetic faith; 3) we believing  humans detect lies poorly, no better than by chance, and literature is a form of lying-.  Why do we have 'lie blindness"?  Now we come to the crux. In literature (and other arts), we believe because we don't act on narratives we are perceiving.  And that's odd.

It's odd because the primary business of any brain is to move its body--to act in relation to what that body and brain perceive. When we simply listen to someone narrating, however, we do not act to change what we are hearing. Suppose someone tells you that a bomb is about to go off three blocks away.  During the time you are listening to them, you don't act.  You believe. Only after you have finished listening and believing, do you decide whether they are telling the truth or not and what you are going to do about it.  You inhibit action during the narrative.  If this person were pretending, you would not reliably detect the lie.

The point is--and the experimental literature we looked at in my second blog on this subject says as much--to comprehend any narrative, we believe it during the narrative.  After it is over, we decide whether to continue belief and whether or not to disinhibit our motor systems and act on the basis of what we have perceived.

Animals' play follows this same inhibition of action.  Watch a pair of lion cubs playing in one of Public TV's nature programs.  They get their teeth around one another's necks in what would be a killing bite, but they stop. They inhibit that final bite.  In play, the players do not act in a final, damaging way, otherwise it would not be play.  Play serves human children the same way.  Children need to learn  when and how much to act, and they learn through play.  Animals' or children's play inhibits actions, and play is the prototype of a literary experience.

Frontal lobe inhibition limits actions, and that is essential to play.  This essence of play carries over into the world of literature. Throughout the history of aesthetics, philosophers have agreed that what we bring to works of art is a special way of attending to them, an "aesthetic attitude." They have offered many ways of describing it: aesthetic contemplation, being not personally involved, concentrating only on the aesthetic object, being "distanced," viewing in a non-practical way.

Many theorists have observed this phenomenon, but it was Kant who enlarged the idea and established "disinterestedness" as a cardinal element in an appropriate response to artistic works.
Kant’s word was interesselosigkeit, lack of interest. "Interest" in this context means having an aim or purpose, like having a business "interest" in what is happening or an investment in one’s critical opinion.  (Disinterested, one must sometimes remind students, does not equal uninterested.)

What makes art art, then, is that we agree not to be practical. We will not act or plan to act in order to deal with what is represented in the work of art while we are enjoying it. We may cry or laugh in response to what we are reading or watching, we may turn pages or look through our opera glasses, we may add to the shopping list after a commercial, but we don’t plan to do anything to the work of art itself, especially while we are involved with it.