Can spending time alone with a book of fiction be more than a pastime? A group of psychologists and neural scientists exploring the relationship between reading and the brain have come to the conclusion that reading fiction provides not only a training platform for socialization, but an arena through which we can widen our sense of who we are and what is possible for us.
Reading Fiction is a Training Platform for Social Skills
According to Jeremy Hsu in his article,"The Secret of Story-telling: Why We Love a Good Yarn," Scientific American Mind 19, 46 - 51 (2008), story-telling is intrinsic to all cultures. There is evidence of communal acts of narration in ancient societies and certainly in our modern culture where a deluge of stories emerges daily in print, audio and video forms. Certainly, a characteristic behavior that is so persistent in societies throughout human history must tell us something about our evolutionary past, or more significantly, about the way we are formed by it.
Psychologist Keith Oatley once compared reading fiction to a flight simulator: a pilot in training uses a flight simulator before he mans his first plane. Fiction provides the "as if" situation that nurtures our sense of empathy and social response, preparing us for more appropriate reactions in the real world.
Reporting on a 2010 study done with preschool children, Oatley notes that children who were more frequently exposed to fictional stories and fictional movies seemed more perceptive in their understanding of the needs and emotions of others.
Reading fiction provides the context in which children can experience thinking about other people as well as perceiving how others would think and act in a particular situation. Such imaginary situations prepare them more readily for acceptance of those who think differently, a significant asset for socialization in the real world.
Reading Fiction Widens Our Sense of Self
Fiction also widens our sense of who we are and what we can be. In his book, Literature and the Brain (Gainesville, Florida :The PsyArt Foundation,2009) Norman N. Holland points out one defining feature of fiction - its ability to "transport" the reader out of the self into the experiences of an imaginary character.
This sense of loss and merger is a two-way experience when "the boundary between us and the work of art disintegrates in two ways: from us to work of art, from work of art to us."
Studies using an fMRI scanner reveal that when we are involved with a character's situation, our brain acts as though we were doing the action itself. So precise is this engagement that even reading about someone picking up or laying down a pencil activates the hand area's motor planning and body-sensing cortices located in our brain.
For Holland, this kind of transport brings the reader to the experience of flow or entrancement, during which the brain becomes hyper-attentive to what it is focused on and, simultaneously, unresponsive to the body and its environment.
And in this state of trance, a willing suspension of disbelief, we fully activate the right hemisphere of the brain which enhances our appreciation of metaphors and ambiguities, precisely those tools needed to understand a world that is neither black nor white, but infinitely variegated in hues and tones. It is here, as well, that our sense of self, of who we are and what is possible widens.
Reading fiction develops the brain; it also develops our sense of self. Curling up with a book of fiction is not as "useless" as it might seem; it might be just what we need to cope with the our own situations and with those in the community around us.
Source:
- Oatley, Keith. "In the Minds of Others," Scientific American Mind 22, 63-67 ( 2011)
Mary Desaulniers - I am a retired teacher and grandmother looking forward to the next 30 or more years with great relish and enthusiasm. My passions are ...
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