Feeling for fictional characters 2

A couple of days ago I asked for help with the question - raised by Ophelia - why we care about fictional characters. Much help has been forthcoming. One reader emailed as follows:

Your question about emotional attachments to fictional characters reminded me of a passage from Julian Jaynes' The Origins of Consciousness... where he talks about how our ability to simulate anxiety (or happiness, love etc) serves as a kind of practice for the real thing. Don't know how useful that particular theory is for understanding why we might be drawn to attachments to fictional entities (or whether I buy it as at all valid) but most interesting to me was his reference (p. 462) to an event (which I never forgot): he describes what happened at the first performance of a Greek tragedy. Apparently, the audience wasn't quite prepared for the intense feelings this new art form would stir up:

This is demonstrated in the famous incident described by Herodotus of the very first tragedy performed in Athens. It was performed only once. The play was The Fall of Miletus by Phrynicus, describing the sack of that Ionian city by the Persians in 494 B.C., a disaster that had happened the previous year. The reaction of the audience was so extreme that all of Athens could not function for several days. Phrynicus was banished, never to be heard of again, and his tragedy burnt.

Other bloggers have also taken up the issue. Mick argues that the mystery is how we can be capable of empathy for others, and that it's no more extraordinary 'to care about people who don't exist than it is to care about people who do'. Tom gives the example of an optical illusion to illustrate the way we can go along with what we know on some level not to be real. George's hypothesis is that 'the imagination does not distinguish carefully between the real and the imagined'. Kris-Stella wonders if the Savanna Principle might apply. And, comparing fictional with future people, Chris observes that those 'who arouse our feelings might not necessarily be those who genuinely suffer most'. Thanks to everyone who responded.