Fiction and Other Minds: The neural basis of understanding unfolding experiences

How do we construct a coherent understanding of unfolding experience? Narrative forms such as film and literature provide a powerful test case: they require us to integrate events and continually update our interpretation as new information arrives. In this talk, I will demonstrate how the human brain supports this process. Based on fMRI results, I will suggest that at the boundaries between narrative events (e.g. scene endings), the brain systematically reactivates contextually relevant past events. These reactivations suggest that prior information is not simply stored, but is dynamically brought back online at key moments of transition. I will relate these neural findings to behavioural measures of unfolding understanding, collected while participants watch a film. The results indicate that neural reactivation at event boundaries tracks participants' evolving interpretations, reflecting the active integration of past and present information. Finally, I will propose that these reactivations not only support online comprehension but also scaffold the later reconstruction of narratives from memory. On this view, event boundaries mark points at which the brain updates an internal model of unfolding experience, one that underpins our ability to interpret narratives and, more broadly, to form narratives from our daily experiences.