How Fiction Fuels Our Brains

Cooperation is essential to everything we do with our loved ones, our friends, and larger society. But cooperation doesn’t always come easy. When someone has a different opinion or vision, we need to be able to consider a perspective other than our own.

Reading fiction may help us do that.

By exploring the inner lives of characters on the page, readers can form ideas about others’ emotions, motives, ideas.

Reading fiction and literature that describe imaginary events or people is good for our mental health — that’s long been discussed. But evidence linking fiction to a broadened mind has been mostly anecdotal. In a recent piece published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, a psychologist and novelist argues that reading or watching narratives may encourage empathy.

“There’s a bit of a buzz about it now,” said Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of the University of Toronto’s Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development. “Researchers are recognizing there’s something important about imagination.”

By exploring the inner lives of characters on the page, readers can form ideas about others’ emotions, motives, and ideas.

To measure empathetic response, a Toronto research group led by Oatley used the “Mind of the Eyes Test,” in which participants viewed 36 photographs of people’s eyes. For each set of eyes, they chose among four terms to guess what the person was thinking or feeling. Reading narrative fiction gave rise to significantly higher scores than reading nonfiction books — and the association remained significant even after personality and individual differences were taken into consideration.

[lz_bulleted_list title=”Commercial Fiction People Are Reading” source=”http://www.nytimes.com”]”The Black Widow” by Daniel Silva|”The Girls” by Emma Cline|”First Comes Love” by Emily Giffin|”Magic” by Danielle Steel|”The Games” by James Patterson and Mark Sullivan[/lz_bulleted_list]

Similar empathy-boosting effects were found when participants watched the fictional television drama “The West Wing,” or played a video game with a narrative storyline. What’s common across all media is the “engagement with characters we can think about,” Oatley said.

“The most important characteristic of being human is that our lives are social,” he added. “What’s distinctive about humans is that we make social arrangements with other people — with friends, with lovers, with children — that aren’t pre-programmed by instinct. Fiction can augment and help us understand our social experience.”

As a literature professor, Amy Erickson, of Minneapolis, Minnesota, said her first response is this research should encourage people to read more.

“Our divisive world needs more empathy. If we can open our minds and learn about different cultures, traditions, and religions, we will be better for it,” she said. The ability to get inside another character’s head can have a profound influence on our ability to feel another’s pain, joy, anger, frustration, or happiness, she added.

Related: Reading is the Secret to Lifelong Health

“If you have ever cried while reading a novel, you have experienced this. I think this is particularly interesting when it comes to historical fiction. Books like ‘Stones from the River’ by Ursula Hegi, or ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ by Anthony Doerr, both have incredible characters (Trudi and Marie-Laure, respectively) who put you right in the middle of World War II. Their stories draw you in and give you powerful, emotional insights. I don’t remember ever having such experiences when reading history textbooks,” Erickson said.

But she wonders how much anyone is reading after recently seeing that people, on average, have an attention span of only eight seconds.

“I wondered if anyone would ever read ‘War and Peace,’ given this statistic. I’m encouraged by things like the Nook, virtual book clubs, and Project Gutenberg. I have to say, though, that I fear a lot of students don’t read at all and instead are plugged into other forms of entertainment.”

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Oatley’s research group proposes it’s not only through good books alone we might better learn empathy. Our learning curve includes novels, short stories, plays, movies, television series — even some video games, he told LifeZette.

This new field of the psychology of narrative fiction still has a long way to go. There are questions, for example, surrounding the role of storytelling in human evolution. “Almost all human cultures create stories that, until now, have been rather dismissively called ‘entertainment,'” notes Oatley. “There is also something more important going on.”

Related: ‘Book’ Some Reading Time This Summer

For those looking to pick up a book up this summer, Erickson recommends any of Fredrik Backman’s works. “If you have elderly people in your life, it may give you a healthy new perspective about them. The books I have read include ‘A Man Called Ove’ and ‘My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry.’ I’ve ordered his other book, ‘Britt-Marie Was Here,’ too. They are sweet reads and the characters are wonderful. You will miss them long after you close the book.”