Rensselaer professor Ellen Esrock researches the effect that our sense of touch, temperature, body position, and pain has on our perceptions of visual art and literature. In this talk, she explores how spectators and readers use their own body to reshape the boundary between themselves and an imagined fictional world. This softening of boundaries permits readers and viewers to immerse themselves in worlds outside of their own and to locate these worlds within the self. Touch, as part of the somatosensory system, functions along with the viscerosensory and motor systems to deepen our emotions and cognitions of these blended realities.