24
votes
Those who read a lot of fiction shown to have improved cognitive abilities
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- If You Read a Lot of Fiction, Scientists Have Very Good News About Your Brain
- Published
- May 10 2024
- Word count
- 483 words
I suppose the association between reading fiction and empathy makes intuitive sense. Beyond exposing you to a lot of different perspectives than your own, written fiction is more prone to first person accounts. It's more feasible to include trains of thought and introspection directly in written work than other media like film or television, which more often has to be seen from the point of view of an arbitrary observer and demonstrate this stuff externally.
This tracks with my experience. I was a voracious fiction reader as a kid, but not so much anymore, and I feel like I can tell the difference in my own abilities.
I read a lot more fiction as a kid than I do now, and I was much smarter, but I don't think the two are related, and I don't think reading fiction as much as I did was a good use of my time. And as far as empathy and theory of mind—the specific areas they highlight—go—night and day am I much better at these now (not surprising given kids generally suck at them).
The paper is not open-access (nor in sci-hub), alas, but the interview and abstract say the effect is small. So if you have noticed a large change, it seems likely there is a different cause. (It wouldn't surprise me if they were correlated, having a common cause.)
Here’s the paper that’s behind a paywall: https://drive.proton.me/urls/2X16KPR4W4#qQ73A3RRs0hZ
This is something I've long believed about the power of fiction, and have previously spoken up about. I think it's easier for people to identify with a fictional character than direct accounts of actual events. When it comes to real people, there's just a sort of mental barrier: they're a stranger we will likely never meet, and their experiences aren't our own. That alone places a step of "distance" between us. It can also be much harder to read certain accounts because they're real, causing people to stop reading or just skim because it's too awful for us to really think about for too long. We want to put it out of our heads as quickly as possible. At the end of the day, those people tend to become just another statistic.
With a fictional character though, readers are basically placing ourselves in their shoes. The fact that we know it's fictional and thus no one got hurt makes certain topics easier to stomach, such as abuse and horrific tragedy like war. Even with historical fiction about real events, we're still reading about the people involved as characters rather than people. Again, that makes it easier to digest everything without getting stuck on the horrors of it all.
Written works also tend to show insight into a character's mind that you just don't get in other mediums. Even third-person perspectives tend to be written from a specific character's point of view, and show a glimpse at their thoughts even if it's just noting their surprise or how a particular scene is described. With that intimate glimpse we start to feel like we know them like a friend or real person, and they become more than just characters on a page.
And because of that, fiction sticks with us. We get attached to fictional characters and mourn their suffering and despair, and can feel genuine elation on their behalf when things go right. I still feel sad over the deaths of some fictional characters, and found myself fearing for the lives of others in ongoing series. I felt relief when things finally go right, because I'm just as invested in their journey as they are.
So to summarize: it makes perfect sense to me that reading fiction increases people's ability to empathize with others. Makes me even sadder about the decline in media literacy. Perhaps the world wouldn't be quite as hostile if more people read rather than just watched TV...
This has always been true. What physical media you own and display has been an expression of both personality and social status for at least 100 years. Maybe it feels more extreme now because physical ownership is no longer the only way to own media, so you have to explicitly seek out physical copies of things?
I'm old enough to remember when more men read. Many of them read thrill seeking paperbacks by Tom Clancy or Zane Grey. My theory is that video games have cut into that market. Many men are playing red dead redemption rather than reading westerns.
Publishers chase whoever will buy their products
Is this just a bit of a recency bias? Both owning particular books and what one was or wasn't reading (whether you actually read it or not) have been status symbols for a very long time.
Social media is just the newest way to demonstrate that status or to find out what the appropriately status worthy books are.
I've increased my reading a lot this year since my job has a bit of down time and I don't have much cell service, and a small library of books at home that I figure I should read.
I also watch Jeopardy every night, and not that it's any true measure of intelligence but I've gotten a number of answers right only because of books I've read this year. A Kurt Vonnegut question, and one about The Secret History by Donna Tartt the other day which I'm in the middle of. Just a fun anecdote.
This does make intuitive sense, and it's easy to rationalize how reading fiction might train one to be more empathetic. I can see how being open to accepting the abnormal situations in fiction can make one more open to accepting viewpoints other than their own, in a way that reading factual accounts of real events wouldn't. Another commenter pointed out the frequency of first-person perspectives in fiction books specifically, which would explain why reading is the strongest indicator—experiencing stories from other people's perspectives in such an extremely personal way must do a lot to help a person understand other points of view.
I do have to wonder though... does reading fiction improve cognitive ability, or does improved cognitive ability make you crave fiction? I can just as easily rationalize that being able to understand other people's perspectives would make you more receptive to first-person stories, and it just happens that the majority of first-person narratives are in fiction and autobiographies. I'm curious if this same correlation is present among non-fiction readers who enjoy autobiographies.
Suggested title revision that is less clickbaity: Those Who Read a Lot of Fiction Shown to Have Improved Cognitive Abilities.
Happy to hear dissenting opinions.
I'm not entirely sure if mine is a dissenting opinion, but I tend to reserve the word "clickbait" for titles containing falsehoods. The notion of "clickbait" is, in my view, suffering undue semantic inflation. Nowadays it is used to define any title containing boasting or persuasive language. It is the function of a title to entice potential readers, and calling a title "clickbait" for fulfilling its purpose seems counterproductive.
That is not to say that this particular title shouldn't be improved for any reasons, I just have a different view on what is clickbait and what is not.
Interesting, I would indeed define it myself as a title that's being unnecessarily tantalising in order to prompt your curiousity. E.g.
Or, in a slightly less bombastic but still annoying way
Which irritate me to absolutely no end - hence why you can often see me doing my 'anticlickbait duty' in the comments and nicely asking Cfabbro to adjust the title so it's no longer clickbait hah.
Yeah those titles are awful.
I just don't like that people are maybe being overzealous and forgetting that, while there are bad obnoxious titles, the purpose of a headline is valid. Your two examples are extreme, of course, but illustrative. I don't want appellative titles, but I also don't want titles that read like a thesis about what kind of concrete is best. Titles always had rhetoric, poetry, irony, etc. This reaction to clickbait is clearly overcorrecting. I don't want my titles to be as exciting as a medicine leaflet.
I hear you, absolutley. To me it's the fact that the "claim" of the article could absolutley be summarized into a simple bullet. They just don't, so that you will click. The title doesn't have to necessarily be bland to tell you whether or not you are likely to care about the contents of the article, but when the "hook" is entirely about obscuring the details and making you curious for the intentionally omitted summary it becomes clickbait to me.
In this case, they're just trying to make you go, "what good news?! Am I smarter than other people? Is it good for my memory? It could be anything!" I believe a simple summary is more than reasonable, especially since this article doesn't really do anything more than summarize some studies anyway.
Agreed on the second point, but from what I understand, the 'original' application for the term click-bait was for article links and video thumbnails with text like: "Doctors hate this one thing that their patients do. Do you do it?". or "A woman's cat confronted the bear on their porch. See what happens next!".
Not necessarily the two-part structure, but the one that is structured in a particular way to temp the click. Someone else here may be able to explain that type of lure better than I can but it seems to set up a story or conflict that tempts you to find the resolution for.
Perhaps not, but that is the claim being made by the article.
@cfabbro