Can you put into words your experiences while you sit on a couch and move your eyes smoothly across a piece of paper or a screen, which – as the only sensory input your brain has to process – provides some ink blobs or pixels you have learned to identify as letters after years of training? The following two quotes nicely summarize what I think is essential about this, in terms of evolution, most unnatural daily activity of the mind. They reveal two different aspects or functions that you perhaps are also familiar with. One evokes experiences of immersing oneself in a textual world; the other stirs up emotions and feelings of beauty. Both, the immersive and the aesthetic experiences, so well described in these citations, emerge from an interaction between the contents of the texts they read and the associative semantic networks in their brains.

Throughout this book, I will treat these two aspects apart: immersion, mainly associated with the reading of prose, and aesthetic feelings, most often associated with the reading of poetry. This does not mean, however, that people cannot have aesthetic feelings when reading a novel or immersive experiences during the reception of poetry.