"This is How Literary Fiction Teaches Us to Be Human"

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"More recently, Trends in Cognitive Sciences reported more findings that link reading and empathy, employing a test called “Mind of the Eyes” in which subjects viewed photographs of strangers’ eyes, describing what they believed that person was thinking or feeling (readers of fiction scored significantly higher). It turns out that the narrative aspect of fiction is key to this response. From the study: “participants who had read the fictional story Saffron Dreams by Shaila Abdullah … were found to have a reduced bias in the perception of Arab and Caucasian faces compared to control subjects who read a non-narrative passage.” More plot-driven genre fiction doesn’t seem to have the same effect.

None of this will be terribly surprising to lifelong readers, for whom these empathy-enhancement adventures have always been part of the appeal. However, since reading is widely considered to be just another form of “entertainment,” the specifics of what we read are often considered to be just a matter of personal taste, from childhood onward. Literacy itself has proven key to a person’s ability to function in modern society, even if all one ends up consuming are tweets or news headlines; there has also been pushback from proponents of new media against those who are tilting at windmills (to draw a reference from literary fiction), hampering our civilization’s advancement by clinging to older forms of mass-communication. How will these conversations change if science can prove that certain reading experiences are crucial to the development of the human conscience?...

What’s more, this research suggests that if you don’t persist in reading literature into adulthood, anything you may have gleaned from walking in another person’s shoes may fade with time. This atrophy very likely results in that phenomenon we encounter so often in arguments about politics or urgent social issues, in which people assume they’re more compassionate and open-minded than they really are."

http://www.signature-reads.com/2016/09/this-is-how-literary-fiction-teaches-us-to-be-human/

When did you last have that experience with a book? For a little while I was asking this to people - when did they last have a childhood-type experience while reading? Everyone I asked would pause for a moment of deep nostalgia, and then they would be unable to think of anything for a little bit, and then they would get excited and happy when something came to mind.

I think podcasts are doing this for me sometimes, the ones that report stories by asking their subject to tell their own stories. Like, ReplyAll and Snap Judgment are amazing at this (Invisibilia I have Feelings about).

But reading this inspires me to take a look at my bookcase and choose something that will pull me into someone else's reality.

FB: a passionate argument for reading more books that focus on experiences, not just plot "While picking up a book will never be a replacement for face-to-face encounters with actual humans, in terms of beating back the apathy and entropy that persists (and even flourishes) under these unique 21st-century conditions, this avenue of scientific research must be taken quite seriously."