let's talk about reading

I was going through my RSS feed this morning, as I do to keep up with world events waste time looking at silly blogs, and Boing Boing had posted a study that confirmed something I have known for a long time. It's a study about reading that says that your brain simulates the action that you read about while you're reading it. This is nothing new for me, but it's fun that they studied it. It also means I'm not that unique when it comes to how I read. You see, I've long had trouble, when recalling something I've read, at distinguishing it from a movie. This never happens with movies: I often barely remember the plots of movies, but when I do I always know it was a movie. But if something reminds me of a book I read, I often think, 'oh, like that movie I saw. No wait! Or was it a book?' This is because while I'm reading a book, it's playing like a movie in my head. It's a very active endeavour. Which is why books are much more influential to me - movies, on the other hand, are quite passive. I suppose, though, passive movie watching allows for more analytical analysis of the themes and subject matter, since while reading my mind is entirely taken up by running my private screening of the movie adaptation according to me.