A shift in consciousness has occurred. though we usually just call it reading During that shift, when we become immersed in story, a unique alteration in sensory gating channels occurs. The gating of the feeling sense is no longer narrow; it opens more widely—and this is crucial to the art, to the story coming alive inside us. There is a reason why gating opens more widely (and the more accomplished the writer, the more widely it opens). It happens because writers learn, one way or another, to combine the visual and feeling senses into one unique sensory medium.
