What do we See when we Read?

What do we see, in our mind’s eye, when we read a novel or poem? What don’t we see? And what difference does it make whether we do or not? There’s a great deal of variation, having to do with who we are, what we’ve experienced, and where we sit on the “phantasia” spectrum; but there’s also a surprising degree of overlap, which savvy writers can exploit to grip, challenge, amaze, amuse, and devastate us. Because imagination uses roughly the same mechanisms as perception, and because perception tends to focus on the emotive and the goal-relevant, writers can cajole, motivate, and even fool us into creating mental imagery. To get what we need, sometimes we have to be persuaded we are getting what we want.