The term immersive has become a vaunted catch phrase, an adjective that has been applied to a dizzying range of nouns. To cite just a few samples, you have immersive television, immersive multimedia, immersive encounters, immersive experiences, immersive environments, immersive education, immersive virtual reality, and on and on.

Dictionary.com offers this definition:

Immersive: noting or pertaining to digital technology or images that deeply involve one’s senses and may create an altered mental state. 

A new addition to this stable of concepts is Immersion Reading, coined by Amazon.com in reference to its Whispersync for Voice the technology and capabilities of the Kindle Fire HD, as well as supported smartphones and tablets. In a nutshell, it works this way.

  1. You purchase a Kindle book. If there is matching narrated audio on Amazon’s sister site, audible.com, you are granted the opportunity to buy the audio version for a greatly reduced price.
  2. When you open the ebook on the Kindle Fire HD, Kindle Fire HDX, or Kindle Fire HDX 8.9″, the audio begins downloading.
  3. As it continues to download, you can start the audio narration and a highlighted bar tracks the corresponding words on the ereader page.
  4. You can stop listening and go back to reading. Or, you can turn the narration back on with the play button, shut your eyes, and just listen.

Trying this for the first time, I thought it would be a cumbersome, joyless experience. The narrator reads far more slowly than you would naturally be reading the page, so why track along with the highlighted words? But, listening to You Only Live Twice, the experience proved more “immersive” than I expected. Narrator pronunciations of unfamiliar French and Chinese terms were enlightening. Tracking words and listening at the same time initially felt uncomfortable, but as my brain adapted to the process, it became more of a heightened reading experience (though I’m still not sure I’d want to read an entire book this way).

An article in Scientific American from some years backs shone new light on how the brain multitasks, summarized in the lead-in: New research shows that rather than being totally devoted to one goal at a time, the human brain can distribute two goals to different hemispheres to keep them both in mind—if it perceives a worthy reward for doing so.

An explanation for how this works was offered:

The area of the brain that was highly active in the observed multitasking behavior, the frontopolar cortex (which organizes pending goals while the brain completes another task), is “especially well developed” in humans, Koechlin says. It helps organize tasks and the order in which their components should be completed (as highlighted by patients who have damaged this part of the brain and are especially poor at multitasking, he notes). This area’s lesser development in other primate species leads Koechlin to think that the ability to hold more than one goal in mind at once might be unique to our species.

In my personal experience, I’ve always found it helpful in advancing understanding of musical notation to listen to audio (in an application such as Apple’s Logic Pro or GuitarPro) while following the highlighted notes in the musical notation panel. Listening in this way and applying the sounds to the notation seems help the brain more quickly master notational conventions, dotted quarter notes and rests and 5/4 time signatures linked to the equivalent audio signals. And, in learning a foreign language, hearing words while reading them (as you can do online with Babbel) makes it easier to absorb and understand the language

You might argue (and I wouldn’t disagree) that reading by itself is an immersive experience—the senses are fully involved if the author is skilled at engaging them in descriptions. Amazon’s Immersion Reading is an intriguing experiment, and, if nothing else, a pretty inexpensive way to gain access to top-notch audiobooks. You can both listen to a title and read it while Whispersync keeps track of your place, updating both bookmarks in the audio and ebook versions (or both, of course, if you’re deep into Immersion Reading).

This article is cross-posted from our sister site, epublishyourself.com.

Image courtesy of Jason deCaires Taylor, Creative Commons licensed.