Our Life is a Fantasy
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Reading fiction contributes a great deal to our understanding of the world, to our ability to deal with all kinds of situations, to development of our emotional and cognitive competences, such as imagination, empathy and theory of mind. While coping with fictional characters, worlds and situations, brain’s cognitive circuits treat them the same way as if they were real. Reading fantastic literature broadens our focus to the wider reality, containing both close and far away future, alternate universes, and necessity to communicate with very different intelligent beings. While reading about dragons, aliens or miscellaneous human, posthuman and not at all human societies, our brain is trained to deal with unreal, surreal and not yet real situations, fantastic literature functions as a trainer for matters we may face in the real world in some form. Analysing several chosen stories from different genres of fantastic literature, I will focus on the presented models of (not only) human societies, with special attention paid to their attitude towards nature and the other intelligent species. This will be the platform for hypothesising about the applicability of these models for today’s world and for pondering over an impact of reading fantastic literature on reader´s mind, supported with findings of cognitive sciences concerning the importance of reading and daydreaming in relation to the real life. |