Most readers will be familiar with this scene. At two in the morning, you’re engrossed in a book long after you made a self-promise to stop. A character is dealing with something, such as grief, betrayal, or a decision for which there is no clear solution, and somewhere in their chest, there is a pull that is similar to how you felt when that same thing happened to you. You didn’t experience it, though. Someone you’ve never met invented it on a page.
Even though it seems insignificant, that moment may be accomplishing something more important than amusement. Depending on your level of skepticism, the results of the last 20 years of research into what happens in the brain when a person truly inhabits a story are either subtly amazing or blatantly bizarre.
For a large portion of his career, University of Toronto cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley has focused on this issue. His description of fiction as “the mind’s flight simulator” is one of those that strikes a chord because it is accurate in a way that seems almost too straightforward. Because the risks of practicing in the real world are too great, a pilot trains for catastrophic scenarios in a simulator. Oatley contends that fiction has a structurally similar effect on social life. You can sit inside the head of someone going through forty years of addiction, exile, or falling in and out of love without having to bear the consequences of those experiences. However, the brain is not fully aware of the distinction. When you read the word “kick,” parts of your brain linked to kicking are activated. Grasping areas illuminate when a character makes a grab. The body is practicing things it hasn’t done before.
The distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction is one that scholars frequently bring up, and it’s important to stop there because it’s a difficult one. No one wants to hear that their beach reading is unimportant. Working out of the New School for Social Research in New York, David Kidd and Emanuele Castano conducted a series of studies involving over a thousand participants, measuring exposure to fiction through an author recognition test and evaluating performance on a test called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” in which participants attempt to identify the emotion depicted in photographs of eyes. The findings held true for three separate samples: better performance was predicted by familiarity with literary fiction. Knowledge of genre fiction did not. Saying it aloud is still a little awkward. Castano was cautious to point out that genre fiction serves a variety of functions. It creates its own social map, assisting readers in identifying types, comprehending cultural norms, and navigating well-known patterns. However, it requires different mechanisms. Characters in literature are difficult to classify. They act in an uncharacteristic manner. They are contradictory. It turns out that following them forces the reader to continuously reevaluate their presumptions about this person, which is a great practice for doing the same with actual people.
The capacity to comprehend that other people have different mental states, beliefs, desires, and intentions from your own is known as theory of mind, and it develops in early childhood but is not fixed. Depending on how much you’re asked to deduce what’s going on inside other people, it continues to be used or ignored. This is a question that comes up frequently when reading literary fiction. Rarely are a character’s motivations explicitly stated; instead, the reader must fill in the blanks. After years of regular reading, that mental exercise seems to leave a lasting impression. Diana Tamir of Princeton’s Social Neuroscience Lab discovered that individuals who regularly read fiction exhibited increased activity in areas of the brain’s default mode network related to contemplating the mental states of others, both as a baseline function and during reading.
As this research mounts, there’s a sense that we’ve been underestimating the true impact of books. For a long time, social avoidance has been symbolized by the shy bookworm who would rather read novels than attend parties. The stereotype might be inaccurate. Instead of retreating from human complexity, someone who has spent years delving into the inner lives of characters from various eras, social classes, nations, and psychologies might be creating a more complex model of it than most social contexts ever call for.
A few years ago, a Dutch study provided some insight into the chronology of these effects. Students’ empathy scores increased right away after reading the opening of Jose Saramago’s Blindness, in which a stranger offers to help a man who suddenly becomes blind at a traffic light before stealing his car. More intriguingly, empathy scores were higher a week later than they had been immediately after reading among those who had been most emotionally moved by the narrative. Instead of fading, something was taking hold. The mode of transportation was important. A story that is read analytically, at a distance, and without being drawn in might not have the same impact. Immersion appears to be the key.
Johanna Shapiro has developed a humanities program at UC Irvine’s Department of Family Medicine based on precisely this idea. It is argued that medical students who read literary fiction become better physicians because they are more sensitive to a patient’s unspoken distress and are better able to tolerate uncertainty without making a hasty diagnosis. When summed up that way, it sounds a little unlikely, but the reasoning is clear from the research. Applied theory of mind is what a doctor does all day. It might be just as legitimate to train it on complicated fictional characters as it is to train it anywhere else.
None of this is meant to imply that finishing Middlemarch will make someone unquestionably kinder or that reading novels is a straightforward self-improvement endeavor. It is genuinely challenging to establish causality in this research because individuals who are drawn to literary fiction may already be more inquisitive about their inner lives, and it’s possible that this curiosity is what’s driving the books rather than the other way around. The researchers themselves admit that they are unsure. It appears more obvious that the connection between reading and empathy is not coincidental, and that something in the structure of serious fiction—the characters’ resistance, the access to interiority, the length of a life—trains something genuine. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that people who take books seriously also tend to be exceptionally good at taking other people seriously, regardless of whether that training is the cause or the companion of social intelligence.
Chloe Olliver is senior editor at vclib.org, where she leads editorial coverage of literary criticism, political commentary, cultural analysis, and the evolving relationship between literature and public life across New York City and beyond. With a career spanning the intersection of literary journalism, political commentary, and educational publishing, Chloe brings both rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an accessible editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant.