The Neuroscience Of Game Of Thrones

Our brains identify our favorite fictional characters with our sense of self.

When people identify strongly with fictional characters, they use the same part of the brain as they do for their own identity. Photo by Kylo/Unsplash.

Timothy Broom is fascinated by how people are affected by the stories they choose to engage with. He’s also a huge fan of Game of Thrones finds he identifies with the Starks as he immerses himself in the story. And that’s what inspired his work as a doctoral student: to understand what happens in the brain when we lose ourselves in a story.

Now in a new study, Broom and his co-authors found that when people who really get into ‘becoming’ a fictional character use the same part of the brain to imagine the character that they do to imagine themselves. And that helps explain why some people can be transformed by fiction in the way others are by personal experience.

“For some people, fiction is a chance to take on new identities, to see worlds through others’ eyes and return from those experiences changed,” said Dylan Wagner, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State in a press release.

Broom can relate to that. “It is one of my favorite things in the world to lose myself in a good story and I absolutely find myself inhabiting the perspectives of characters, feeling what they feel and wanting them to succeed in their endeavors,” he told me. “I…