Using fMRI scans on 19 lonely fans of “Game of Thrones”, researchers discovered that they processed their favorite characters similarly to real friends in their brains. This suggests that lonelier …::In lonely people, the boundary between real friends and favorite fictional characters gets blurred in the part of the brain that is active when thinking about others, a new study found.Researchers scanned the brains of people who were fans of “Game of Thrones” while they thought about various characters in the show and about their real frien…

  • @scarabic
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    181 year ago

    I believe there’s a subplot in Fahrenheit 451 where the protagonist’s wife becomes lost in a surround-screen fictional show that she talks about as if it were her real social life. This is not some aberration but the intended way for it to be consumed - the characters turn and address her directly throughout the show.