Publication Tag: Neuroscience

Ebooks of the future may respond to the emotional experience of the reader. physiological measures could capture a reader’s emotional state and use this to enhance the reading experience by adding matching sounds or to change the storyline, thereby creating a hybrid art form between literature and gaming. We describe the theoretical foundation of the emotional and creative brain and review the neurophysiological indices that can be used to drive future ebook interactivity in a real-life situation. As a case study, we report the neurophysiological measurements of a bestselling author during nine days of writing, which can potentially be used later to compare them to those of the readers. In designated calibration blocks, the artist wrote emotional paragraphs for emotional pictures. Analyses showed that we can reliably distinguish writing blocks from resting, but we found no reliable differences related to the emotional content of the writing. The study shows that measurements of EEG, heart rate , skin conductance, facial expression, and subjective ratings can be done over several hours a day and for several days in a row. In follow-up phases, we will measure 300 readers with a similar setup.