While we read, we let the book take the place of our verbal thoughts. In effect, for a short time, someone else does our thinking for us – and even once the book is closed, this different style of thought leaves its impression. For The Chameleon, this absorption of thought is particularly pronounced, and they are therefore alive to the ways in which the way they think has been changed by what they’ve read.

A significant part of how we develop our verbal thoughts (or ‘inner speech’) involves incorporating the voices of others. We ‘pick up’ fragments of how other people express themselves in language – idioms, turns of phrase, etc. – which become a part of how we think in words. This process continues throughout our lives, so that our thoughts are always being moulded by the words of others – those that we hear, and those that we read.

Reading is an incredibly intimate experience. We observe characters growing and changing, and come to know their inner lives – sometimes in far more depth than we can ever know real people. For The Medium, this relationship persists beyond the covers of the book. The characters remain, sometimes as richly developed personalities, sometimes as little more than echoes, but ultimately coming to form a part of the Medium’s inner life.

As we come to know other people, we develop personality models or ‘consciousness frames’ that help us predict how those people will behave. We differ in how much we’re aware of these models, and the qualities of other people that they incorporate (some individuals are very conscious of how other people sound, for instance). When it comes to reading, we begin to develop these same kinds of models of characters – even to the point that they might speak for themselves.

Whether it unfolds like a movie or as a series of snapshots, reading can be a deeply imagistic experience. For The Spectator, the story-world is vivid, developed, and immersive. Like the eye of the camera, the Spectator occupies the ‘view from nowhere’, watching as the story plays out before their mind’s eye. How words prompt imagery is still a hotly contested area in reading research.

One recent theory suggests that processing a word involves activating what are called ‘experiential traces’ – a kind of sensory and emotional residue left behind by the real-world experiences that have become associated with that word. This would mean that mental images aren’t just the by-products of a more abstract process of decoding language, but are instead bound up with how we’re able to understand what we read at all.

For many of us, reading is a deeply immersive experience – we lose ourselves in the world of the story, which often seems alive with vivid detail. Yet for The Traveller, immersion is not just a matter of observing, but of interacting. Because of how most stories are written, the protagonist usually provides the ideal vehicle, meaning that Traveller and protagonist share the same perspective as they embark upon their journey.

To understand the Traveller we have to understand the body’s role in imagination. When we imagine an object or situation, one idea is that we are ‘performing’ the actions we’d need to perform to have that experience. With reading, these actions and images are strung together in a way that creates the impression of having a fully-fledged perspective on a world – a ‘body’, in other words – which maps onto the experiences of a character.

When most of us first learn to read by ourselves, we begin by reading out loud – listening to our own narration of the story. Even long afterwards, The Narrator continues to perform the text to themselves, listening to the internal ‘audiobook’ that they produce for their mind’s ear.

In early development, we first learn to think in words by speaking out loud. At a certain point, we recognise the advantages of being able to keep these verbal thoughts to ourselves and therefore learn to internalise them. This ‘inner speech’ retains many of the qualities of outer speech, and this is particularly apparent in terms of what happens in the body. When we think in words (including when we read), we sometimes activate the same muscles in the throat, vocal cords, and lips that we would need to use to say the words out loud.

There’s a very close connection between reading and listening; for nearly all of us, our earliest reading experiences involve being read to. For T he Listener, the linguistic performance remains at the heart of the reading experience. While the listener may also experience mental imagery, the language of the communicative act is rarely something that fades out of awareness.

The way we develop the capacity for verbal thought – what psychologists call ‘inner speech’ – is intimately bound up with the dialogues we encounter and have with others. To a greater or lesser extent, those dialogues end up being incorporated into how we think in words (sometimes including how other people’s voices sound). In much the same way, reading narratives – which emerged from the conversational storytelling we do all the time – also still bears the hallmarks of the social interaction between the storyteller and their audience.