There’s experimental evidence for this. Children, for example, sometimes actually believe that puppets are alive. Even animals sometimes react to pictures the same way they react to real things. The industrialized world is so full of human faces, like in ads, that we forget that it’s just ink, or pixels on a computer screen. Every time our ancestors saw something that looked like a human face, it probably was one. As a result, we didn’t evolve to distinguish reality from representation. The same perceptual machinery interprets both.
The rational parts of our minds, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, do indeed know that what we’re looking at, or reading, isn’t real. One way to understand this is by thinking about optical illusions. In the Muller-Lyer illusion, we can trace and know the two horizontal lines are the same length, but at the same time appear to be different lengths. Even after you understand how an illusion operates, it continues to fool part of your mind. This is the kind of double knowledge we have when we consume fiction.
These perceptual areas of our brains are very closely connected to our emotions. That’s why emotions don’t just motivate us to act in certain ways but force us to interpret the world differently. A 2011 paper, for example, explained how fear can affect vision, moods can make us more or less susceptible to visual illusions, and desire can change the apparent size of goal-relevant objects. The authors proposed that emotions offer information “about the costs and benefits of anticipated action,” knowledge that can be used swiftly, without thought, “circumventing the need for cogitating on the possible consequences of potential actions.”
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