Yours, Mine, Ours

Seema Singh — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:58:00 GMT

How many times have you grit your teeth, thumped the air, bitten your nails, driven at top notch speed, or even shed a tear while reading a book? Chances are at least a few times, if not these things then probably a host of other activities, visualizing yourself as one of the characters in the book.

Why do we imagine the scenes in a book differently? How do you and I share perspectives? Psychologists say we use different perspectives depending on which pronouns are used. A team of US army and university researchers report this in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science.

In an experiment, they made volunteers read sentences describing everyday actions, starting with: I am..., You are..., He is... Then the volunteers looked at pictures and had to indicate whether the images matched the sentences they had read.

When the volunteers read statements that began, "You are..." they pictured the scene through their own eyes. When they read statements explicitly describing someone else (e.g. "He is...") then they tended to view the scene from an outsider's perspective.

But when first-person statements ("I am...") were used, the volunteers who read only one such sentence viewed the scene from their point of view but when they read three first-person sentences, they saw the scene from an outsider's perspective.

"These results provide the first evidence that in all cases readers mentally simulate described objects and events, but only embody an actor's perspective when directly addressed as the subject of a sentence," researchers write.

The authors suggest that when we read second-person statements ("You are..."), there is a greater sense of "being there" and this makes it easier to place ourselves in the scene being described, imagining it from our point of view.

How is it with you?

I used to have ‘serious perspectives' when I read more fiction. The turning point came when long ago a friend, who only read non-fiction, introduced me to Nani A Palkhivala's We, the Nation, as I introduced him to Ayn Rand, Erich Segal, Salman Rushdie and the others.

Now, when science is stranger than sci-fiction, I struggle catching up with what's happening in the non-fictional world, which, you see, doesn't leave much room for imagination!

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Lab Rats : Ayn Rand

Yours, Mine, Ours