What I did on my holidays
I’ve just returned from a two-week holiday in France feeling relaxed and refreshed, but also troubled by the knowledge that I haven’t written anything for this blog in ages. So now dear reader, to address this oversight, you’re going to have the dubious honour of hearing all about my holiday. Happily, however, I can fit in a bit of related science as well.
My family and I have been spending the last two weeks staying in a fairly large French cottage near a town in Normandy called Bernay, around 50km east of Caen. The days were spent doing child-friendly things like going to zoos, aquariums and animal farms (my kids are more than happy doing any kind of animal-oriented activity) or playing in the cottage’s substantial garden.
The highlight was the Cerza zoo at Lisieux, which is a safari park that you can walk around. You can also travel around it in a little train and this experience practically caused my youngest daughter to combust with excitement.
In the evening, however, when the kids were in bed, I was able to indulge quite heavily in a couple of my favourite passions: watching films and reading. Often while also indulging in a couple of my other passions: listening to music and drinking alcohol. Now I obviously also do all of these things at home, but usually not to the same extent, encumbered as I am by the constraints of work and going to bed on time.
We were joined for the first week by some friends and their kids, and so some of the evenings were also spent playing board games. But after my non-writer friend thrashed me at Scrabble (getting over twice my score), I went off this idea and returned to the relative safety of books and films.
As with most French cottages we’ve stayed in, this place had a TV and DVD player and so we took lots of DVDs to watch. Unlike most other French cottages, however, this place also had a pretty good DVD collection. In addition, our friends brought quite a few DVDs and so I ended up watching a load of films that I hadn’t seen before. These varied from the literary (Atonement) to the critically-acclaimed (The Last King of Scotland) to the better-than-I thought-it-was-going-to-be (Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End) to the frankly ridiculous (Die Hard 4.0).
I also read Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle, which is a sequel to his The Rotters’ Club, before starting Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles: making music in the 1960s. I read The Rotters’ Club a few years ago but didn’t think that much of it, concluding that it didn’t really go anywhere and seemed half-finished (although Coe did state at the end of the book that there would be a sequel).
The Closed Circle was not only much better, but also made me re-appraise The Rotters’ Club. Many of the themes and plot points that were left unresolved in the first book are not only continued in the second book, but expanded and enriched. Indeed, I enjoyed The Closed Circle so much that I’m now considering re-reading The Rotters’ Club, and I hardly ever re-read books.
Now this is all very interesting you might be saying (or maybe not), but where’s the science. Well the point is that I love reading books just as much as I love watching films, and greatly enjoyed my recent freedom to be able to do both. For many people, however, films are way more enjoyable than books. But now a team of medical researchers have shown that these people are missing a trick, by showing that a book can induce the same level of excitement as the most thrill-packed movie.
A film produces its thrilling effect because seeing someone in a supposed death-defying or emotionally-charged situation invokes similar emotional feelings in the brains of those in the audience. Research has shown that watching someone experience an emotion activates the same areas of the brain as actually experiencing that emotion. Now, researchers from the University of Groningen have shown that the same thing happens when people read about an emotionally-charged event, or at least a disgusting event.
Using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, the researchers monitored the brain activity of people as they either watched a film of someone acting with disgust after drinking a liquid, read about a disgusting event or actually drank a foul-tasting liquid. In all cases, the researchers found increased activity in a part of the brain known as the anterior insular, which is known to be involved in generating feelings of disgust.
‘What this means is that whether we see a movie or read a story, the same thing happens: we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted – and that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through,’ explains lead researcher Christian Keysers.
What it also means is that I will continue to spend lots of time both reading books and watching films when I go on holiday. In between going to loads of zoos, aquariums and animal farms.
