While the rational part of our mind, the prefrontal cortex, knows that fiction is, well, fiction, and that we should be skeptical of anonymous sources and writing in general, the other parts of our brain do not. Horror movies induce real physiological responses. You can get goose bumps from a ghost story, after all, even without any visuals. In the 2023 movie Anatomy of a Fall, a prosecutor reads the protagonist’s autofiction to her on the stand as evidence that she may have wanted to kill her husband. How, he asks, could she have had those thoughts and written those words if she had not
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