The pleasurable surrender of the mind to an imaginative world is often described, in Coleridge‘s phrase, as “the willing suspension of disbelief.” But this is too passive a formulation even for traditional media. When we enter a fictional world, we do not merely “suspend” a critical faculty; we also exercise a creative faculty. We do not suspend belief so much as we actively create belief. Because of our desire to experience immersion, we focus our attention on the enveloping world and we use our intelligence to reinforce rather than to question the reality of the experience.
— Janet H. Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, (The Free Press, 1997), p. 110.
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"The pleasurable surrender of the mind"