Gonzo Journalism, Subjectivity, and The Psychology of Immersion
In 1970, Hunter S. Thompson was sent to Louisville to cover the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's Monthly. He was a sports journalist, on a sports assignment, at one of the most storied sporting events in the country. And he didn't watch the race. Instead, he and the illustrator Ralph Steadman spent the weekend careening through the crowd, documenting the spectacle of the spectators themselves: the bourbon-soaked faces, the stumbling chaos, the "whiskey gentry" in their seersucker suits. As Thompson later wrote, they didn't care what was happening on the track. They had, in Thompson’s words “come to watch the real beasts perform”.
This was the piece that birthed Gonzo journalism, a style defined by its refusal to stand outside the experience. Traditional journalism treats the reporter as a transparent window: the event happens, the journalist records it as objectively and dispassionately as possible, and the reader receives a clean account. Thompson rejected this entirely. The journalist doesn't hover above the story. The journalist is in it. You are part of what's happening, and your subjective, moment-to-moment experience of being there is not a contaminant to be filtered out. It is the story.
Thompson's methods were, to put it gently, not a recommended lifestyle. (The pharmaceutical inventory alone in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reads like a controlled substances catalog.) But strip away the excess and there's a psychological insight underneath that deserves serious attention: the attempt to be "objective" about a lived experience introduces its own kind of distortion. By striving for detachment, you remove the very thing that makes the experience what it is. You lose what it felt like to be there.
This is, at its core, a question about immersion. What does it mean to be fully inside an experience? What happens in the brain when we cross the threshold from observing something to being absorbed by it? And why has this become so rare?
The Psychology and Neuroscience of Immersive Experience
Despite decades of research, the academic literature on immersion has been, frankly, a mess. Researchers have used overlapping terms like immersion, presence, transportation, and flow, sometimes treating them as synonyms, sometimes as subcomponents of each other, sometimes as cause and effect. In a 2024 review, Chen, Hu, and Fisher conducted a scoping analysis of this tangled literature and proposed something clarifying.
Rather than trying to adjudicate between competing definitions, they identified three underlying processes that cut across all of them: interactivity (the degree to which you can act upon and shape the experience), motivation (the value you assign to staying in the experience versus leaving it), and boundary alteration (the process by which the perceptual boundary between "here" and "there" shifts).
It's the third process, boundary alteration, that gets to the heart of psychological immersion. When you're truly immersed, the boundary between your physical environment and the world of the experience begins to dissolve. The room you're sitting in fades. The movie screen, the page of the novel, the concert hall becomes, psychologically, where you are. Your attention isn't split between the experience and everything else.
This is precisely what Thompson was getting at with the Kentucky Derby. The "objective" story, who won the horse race, existed on one side of a boundary. The actual experience of being at the Derby existed on the other. Most reporters stayed on the objective side, filing their clean dispatches. Thompson’s experience blurred the boundaries; he crossed over.
Attention as the Mechanism of Immersion
But what enables this crossing? Your notes from your everyday experience probably offer a clue. You know that immersion requires something from you. It requires bandwidth. Specifically, it requires attentional bandwidth.
Research on immersion measurement has consistently found that when someone is deeply immersed, their capacity to respond to secondary stimuli drops significantly. In dual-task experiments, participants watch a film while simultaneously responding to periodic tones or visual cues. The more immersed they are (as measured by self-report), the slower their reaction times to these secondary signals become. Immersion doesn't just involve attention. It consumes it - all of it. When you're in, there's very little cognitive resource left for anything outside.
This connects directly to what we know about working memory and the brain's temporal response windows. As we’ve seen, the brain processes experience across a hierarchy of timescales. Quick, sensory events (on the order of seconds) are handled by primary sensory regions. But slower experiences, ones that unfold over minutes or hours, recruit higher-order areas like the temporal-parietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex, regions associated with narrative comprehension, meaning-making, and self-relevant thought.
Immersive experiences engage these longer temporal response windows. They require you to hold information in mind, integrate it with what came before, and project it forward. This is what gives them their psychological thickness, their sense of density and depth. And this is why they demand so much attentional bandwidth: you can't track a complex, evolving narrative and simultaneously entertain thoughts about what's happening on your phone. Counterfactual thinking - our typical, constant worry that we could be, should be, having another, better experience, is subdued. You become immersed; devoted entirely to the current, moment-to experience.
How Fast-Paced Digital Media Undermines Immersion
This is where the modern digital environment comes in, and where the picture becomes concerning. As we've seen, immersion requires sustained attention, long temporal response windows, and the progressive accumulation of meaning over time. Fast-paced digital media provides the opposite of each.
The average TikTok video is 40 to 50 seconds. Each piece of content is self-contained, requiring no integration with what preceded it. No matter how long you scroll, there is no building of narrative, no engagement of working memory's longer processing windows, no accumulation. Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht at the University of Toronto have found that this pattern of "digital switching," rapidly jumping between short clips, doesn't just fail to produce engagement. It actively produces boredom. Participants who watched a single ten-minute video reported greater enjoyment and meaning than those given the freedom to switch between clips. The switchers, despite having more choice, felt less connected to everything they watched.
The deeper issue is what this does to our capacity for immersion in the first place. If immersion requires the willingness to commit attentional bandwidth to a single, unfolding experience, and if our daily habits are training us to distribute that bandwidth across dozens of micro-experiences per hour, then we may be systematically eroding the very cognitive infrastructure that makes immersion possible.
The Subjective Nature of Perception
Objectivity has an important role in journalism and media. Thompson was initially dismissed as a journalist because he lacked it - and never aspired to it. His insights though, go far beyond the tenants of responsible journalism.
He understood the crucial role of subjectivity: that you can't capture what it feels like to be somewhere if you're busy trying not to be there. The rest of us don't need to follow him to Louisville, or anywhere else, to apply the lesson. We just need to be willing, now and then, to get lost in something.
All experience is, in the end, subjective. There is no view from nowhere. There is only the view from where you are, shaped by what you're paying attention to and how deeply you've let it in. As Gustave Flaubert once remarked, “There is no such thing as truth. there is only perception”.
The richest moments of our lives, the ones that stay with us, that feel dense and textured in memory, are the ones where we stopped keeping one foot outside the door.
References for The Psychology AI Art Perception: The Influence of The Brand
Ahn, W. K., Taylor, E. G., Kato, D., Marsh, J. K., & Bloom, P. (2013). Causal essentialism in kinds. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 66(6), 1113-1130.
Bellaiche, L., Shahi, R., Turpin, M. H., Ragnhildstveit, A., Sprockett, S., Barr, N., ... & Seli, P. (2023). Humans versus AI: whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 8(1), 42.
Chiarella, S., Torromino, G., Gagliardi, D., Rossi, D., Babiloni, F., & Cartocci, G. (2022). Investigating the negative bias towards artificial intelligence: Effects of prior assignment of AI-authorship on the aesthetic appreciation of abstract paintings. Computers in Human Behavior, 137, 107406.
Guingrich, R. (March 2024) Interview, personal correspondence via zoom
Johnson, M., & Ghuman, P. (2020). Blindsight: The (mostly) hidden ways marketing reshapes our brains. BenBella Books.
Liu, Y., Mittal, A., Yang, D., & Bruckman, A. (2022). Will AI console me when I lose my pet? Understanding perceptions of AI-mediated email writing. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517731.
Turpin, M., Walker, A., Kara-Yakoubian, M., Gabert, N., Fugelsang, J., & Stolz, J. (2019). Bullshit makes the art grow profounder. Judgment and Decision Making, 14, 658–670.
Wilson, E. A. (2011). Affect and artificial intelligence. University of Washington Press.
