As many of us have experienced, when we get absorbed in a story, a novel or TV series, we can get real emotional attachments to the characters. Far from just being passing connections, research shows that the beliefs, behaviours, and attitudes of our favourite characters can influence our own, and that fictional people can give us a sense of belonging. 

A new brain-scanning study finds the gap between fictional connections and real ones may be closer than we’d assume.

Timothy W. Broom at Dartmouth College, US, and Dylan D. Wagner at Ohio State University suggest in their recently published paper that lonely people even think about their favourite fictional characters similarly to real friends.