Descriptively written passages in novels can invoke the same emotional response as a captivating scene in a movie.

“We placed our participants in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while we first showed our subject short 3s movie clips of an actor sipping from a cup and then looking disgusted,” said Christian Keysers. “Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios; for instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth. Finally, we measured their brain activity while the participants tasted unpleasant solutions in the scanner.”

I know I must have been experiencing a mild case of vertigo during the final scenes of King Kong, set atop New York’s Empire State Building, especially when two of the cast were sharing a tiny platform 1,250 feet above street level.

I wonder if a written version of that scene would bring about the same reaction?