The Power of Reading in Your Head

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

When you're reading, there is a voice in the head, right? I mean, and I listen to a lot of audio books. We've done research at Durham where we scan people while they were listening to these really short stories. And what you can show is that parts of people's auditory cortex essentially activate when the speech marks are there specifically as if they're sounding out.

Shermer and Alderson-Day discuss the psychologist’s journey to understand the phenomenon of sensed-presence: the disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone. Using contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy, Alderson-Day attempts to understand how this experience is possible. Is it a hallucination, a change in the brain, or something else? The journey to understand takes us to meet explorers, mediums, and robots, and step through real, imagined, and virtual worlds.

Ben Alderson-Day is an Associate Professor in Psychology and a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University. A specialist in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. His new book is Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other.