Since childhood, we all constantly hear about the benefits of reading, because it is not without reason that our country was called the most reading country in the world. Scientific evidence confirms that fiction develops the imagination. What other benefits do books provide?
Reading not only develops, trains the imagination, enriches speech, improves the ability to empathize and helps to better understand and feel each other. Canadian psychologist and writer Keith Otley, along with colleagues, studied data from experiments that explored the benefits of fiction for the human brain and psyche.1.
He calls fiction a way of simulating the social world, a kind of “matrix” into which the imagination takes us. Being in a fictional world, we receive lessons that help us better understand others in real life.
Under the direction of Keith Otley, experiments were conducted in which participants took a test to recognize emotions in the eyes. In this test, men and women were shown 36 photographs in turn, in which only the eyes of people were visible, and asked to determine what experiences and emotions reflected in their eyes.
The book is a fragment of someone else’s consciousness, which seems to be transferred from one mind to another.
Participants who regularly read fiction performed significantly better on this test. At the same time, reading technical and other non-fiction literature did not give such an effect.
Reading also stimulates and develops the brain. In another experiment, participants inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner were asked to imagine a scene described in a few simple sentences. The tomograph showed that in the brain of the subjects during the experiment, the activity of the hippocampus, an area associated with learning and memory, increased. Similar processes occur in the brain while reading fiction.
In addition, good literature helps fight prejudice and can teach people of other races and cultures to understand and empathize with them. For example, after reading the book “Saffron Dreams” (a novel about the life of a Muslim woman from Pakistan in New York), the participants, white Americans, changed their negative attitude towards immigrants.
“The main thing in a person is his social life. Unlike animals, our relationships with friends, loved ones, children are not determined by instinct, says Keith Otley. Artistic works enrich the social experience and help to better understand others. Books are not just a way of transmitting information, reading helps to broaden one’s horizons, to learn about the life of other countries, other cultures, and historical periods.
What is a work of fiction, be it a book, film, play or television series? This is a fragment of someone else’s consciousness, which seems to be transferred from one mind to another. Fantasy, storytelling is present in almost all human cultures. Some disparagingly believe that these stories are only for entertainment, in fact they play a very important role.
1 K. Oatley «Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds», Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 20, August 2016.