"Language is a powerful form of virtual reality"

Attention literacy advocates --  here is some very interesting neuroscience from Jeff Zacks at Washington University - St Louis, as featured on NPR's "Science Out of the Box" for January 31, 2009:

Speer, N. K., Reynolds, J. R., & Zacks, J. M. (2007). Human brain activity time-locked to narrative event boundaries. Psychological Science, 18(5), 449-455. 

(available online at http://dcl.wustl.edu/pubs/SpeerPsychSci07.pdf)

note esp. "...the regions identified in this study are integrally involved in detecting the structure of narrated activities, and that this process of segmentation is part of a larger, modality-independent system involved in the comprehension of everyday activities (i.e., involved in comprehending real-world visual events as well as narrated descriptions of those events)."

In other words, when we read or listen to stories, our brains are activated in essentially the same ways they are activated when we are experiencing the real world. 

This reminded me of Henry Jenkins at the 2008 ELI Annual meeting:

"... New Media Literacies... build on an existing framework of literacy and research skills."