Question

A research study has looked into what happens inside your brain while you read and listen to music. You know that thrill(興 奮 )you get when listening to your favorite music?That exciting feeling when you hear your favorite songs?According to a recent study，it seems the same thing can happen while you are reading，but not with every kind of text. This opens up interesting questions around how music，reading and emotions are connected in the brain.

The study

“ We decided we would do a comparison between four or five different kinds of texts to see how the brain reacted，”explains Adam Zeman，a scientist. “ The participants (參 與 者 )lay in an MRI scanner reading the texts，and then we compared brain activity for those five texts.”The texts ranged (涉 及 )from deadly boring ones to highly exciting ones，including the Highway Code，parts from novels，and poems.

So what happened in the participants? brains while they were reading?

Emotional reaction

As the researchers observed，participants found some texts more emotional than others. When reading these emotional texts，there was higher activity in brain areas related to pleasure and reward—the same areas related to the thrill we get when we listen to music. As Zeman says，“ it perfectly shows that the emotional reaction to literature(文 學 )and to music has quite a bit in common. So it doesn't seem to matter whether you are listening or reading if you get a thrill. That was one quite strong finding.”

Introspection(內 省 )

There were more interesting findings. Reading poetry is often considered an activity that requires us to use the brain，but did the study find any truth of this?When the participants were reading poems，the team found there was more activity in a particular group of brain areas called the Default Network. “ These areas seem to be related to things we do with our minds when we are resting，like thinking about what's happened to us recently，thinking about what's going to happen in the near future，about other people，and that network seems to be more strongly related to poetry than with other texts，”explains Zeman. This connection between poetry and introspection could be the subject of further research.

Conclusions

The study shows that the different texts activate different areas of our brains when we read. Zeman says，“ the study did support what we thought:reaction to literature was going to be a bit like the one to music in terms of emotion. We felt that we ended up with a great deal of unanswered questions which we hope somebody will continue to ask.”

1.What did the research try to find out?

A. How music helps us read different kinds of texts.

B. What kind of texts most people like while listening to music.

C. Why reading different texts causes different reactions in emotion.

D. Whether reading can cause similar emotional reaction like music does.

2.What did the participants do in the study?

A. They listened to music. B. They read different texts.

C. They answered many questions. D. They compared brain activities.

3.What can we learn from the study?

A. The emotional texts work better for the research.

B. Poetry reading can activate the Default Network.

C. Music helps to bring pleasure and reward.

D. People think about the past when resting.

Answer 1