Fiction

 Standard test call “Theory of Mind”. Where New York psychologists David Kidd and
Emmanuel Castellano in 2013 asked people to read shorts passages from books. After
that, people will look at series of photographs of people with strong facial expressions
and ask to judge what’s going on their heads based of the expression. The intuitive
ability to see from the way a person is moving and expressing themselves and tell what
is going on inside their heads.
Why Reading Matters
If I came and told you there is this one thing you could all do which would make you more
imaginative, make your memory better, probably improve your personal relationships, and make
you a nicer person, you would probably be very skeptical. And even more so if I said it costs
nothing and probably everybody in this room can already do it. Now, you will probably have
guessed by now that I'm talking about reading –there's a clue in the title.
But I'm not talking about the sort of reading that we all know is incredibly important; that
is, the sort of reading we do for education, the sort of reading we do for administration, the sort
of reading which we have to do nowadays just to get through life. I'm talking rather about fiction,
stories, narratives –the sort of reading where you are reading things from inside another
person's head, where it takes you right inside the character's emotions and feelings and actions
so you are seeing it from their perspective. That's the sort of reading which is at best thought of
as pleasurable and at worst quite often as a waste of time. I mean, I remember my mother
telling me that when she was a child, she was crazy about books but that her father once ripped
a novel out of her hands, saying that 'If you have to read, at least read something useful.'
What I want to tell you today is that, surprisingly, fiction is very useful indeed, in ways
that we probably never previously suspected; in fact, it's more important, probably, than any
other form of reading. And I have some new evidence, which comes rather surprisingly out of
the brain sciences, to support that, which I'll come to. First of all, some not-so-new evidence: in
2013 there was a series of experiments done by two New York psychologists, David Kidd and
Emanuele Castellano. What they did was take people and ask them to read quite short
passages from various types of books.
Some of them were nonfiction books, explanatory or learning books, and some of them
were thrillers, plots, where you read about the events happening in a story but not very much
about the people; you weren't inside their heads. And the third sort was the sort of fiction I am
talking about, which is when you were reading things from the perspective of the characters.
After that, the researchers got the people to look at a series of photographs of people with very
strong facial expressions of one sort or another, and they were asked to judge from the
expressions alone what they thought was going on inside those people's heads.
This is actually quite a standard test for something that we call 'Theory of Mind', which is
a rather bad phrase, I think, for a faculty which we're all, I hope, pretty familiar with; we've all got
it to some extent or another. And that is the intuitive ability to see from the way a person is
moving or expressing themselves what is going on in their head. It allows us to, just at least for
a moment, to step outside our own heads and see the world for a bit from other people's point of
view. And the same faculty, by extension, opens up whole worlds to us because it allows us to
imagine what it's like to be somewhere else, doing something else, seeing it in a different way.
And thus, people who don't have it are quite severely handicapped, particularly in social life –
they find relationships very difficult –and more than that, they are limited by a very limited
imagination. Because without that ability to step outside yourself, it's difficult to imagine
anything, really.
Now, you don't actually have to look at academic papers to see this effect. We're all
quite familiar with it. I want to tell you about a particular –A few years ago, I went to a reading
group which was for people with various types of mental issues. A lot of them have had
severe depression or anxiety, and they had come together to start a reading group. And I joined
several months in, when it was already having effect. The particular meeting, I went to they
were reading 'Wuthering Heights', the English novel, and I just got to this bit where Kathy, the
heroine, had to decide between marrying either boring old Linton or this wildly exciting
tempestuous chap, Heathcliff. So, I just want you to see what they had to say –Every Linton on
the face of the earth might melt into nothing before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff –Stop
there, Faye. Is this sort of state she's in something you'd aspire to?
Would you like to be feeling what Katherine's feeling? Definitely! I want to feel it all the
time, and I felt like that, you know, happy nearly all the time, and it can last for weeks, months.
It's a beautiful idea: one moment she's like 'I am Heathcliff', and then you get the sense that it
could be very, you know, dangerous as well. She's marrying someone under false pretenses. I
could imagine it then from Linton's point of view. Imagine marrying Katherine but then knowing
she's in love with somebody else. And he will, he will find out. I think deep down she should be
with Heathcliff. I think in one way she's sexually attracted to him, and the passion. Yeah. Yes.
And I think she should go for it.
It did seem to me as I watched and listened to those people that this quite simple act of
reading fiction had really changed their lives; and in fact, in one case it actually saved a life. I
know that –as you will probably see in the end, I'll come to it. Now, the question that occurred to
me was, What on Earth is happening in people's brains to have this rather profound effect, this
pastime? So, I just want to go a little bit over what is happening in the brain. You probably know
that our brains are made up of neurons, electrical cells, and that they join together to form
pathways, which have electricity zapping back and forth endlessly, and that electricity ebb and
flow is our thoughts, our emotions, and our feelings. Some of these pathways are pretty similar
in all of us because they're actually built into our genes. Up here, on the left here, they're the
pathways we all have which take light from the eyes to the visual cortex, so the back of our
head.
On the other side of the frame, you have got the connections between the two
hemispheres of the brain so that each side quite literally knows what the other is doing. Now, I
just want to show you quickly the difference between speaking and reading because they are
very different. Speaking is something that, again, is in our genes, we already have those
pathways wired into us when we are born. All you have to do is put a baby around people who
are talking and sooner or later they will start to do it too, it's natural. But reading is not. You
could put a baby in a library, surrounded by books, from the day it's born, and it would never
start spontaneously reading. It has to be taught how to do it. And this is the reason speech has
been with us for at least 100,000 years, quite time for natural selection to actually get it wired
into our brains. But reading probably only started about 5,000 years ago, and until about 100
years ago, most people didn't do it at all. So rather than being able to use those pre-wired,
intuitive, if you like, pathways, every time, every person who learns to read has to do it afresh.
And that means making new pathways, individual pathways, the sort that individuals do make all
through their life. Every time they have an experience will lay down a memory or a new habit;
they create individual pathways, on top of the basic blueprint. And that's what we have to do
when we read.
Quickly, when you look at a brain that's speaking, it's fairly straight forward: if you see a
dog, say. Information zooms to the back of the head, visual cortex, then sort of chunks forward.
As it chunks forward, it picks up memories of what it's looking at until by the time it gets to that
blue area, which is the first of the major language areas, it is then able to put a word to it. And
then it gets jogged on again to that next red area, Broca's, and that's when we remember how to
say it. Quite literally, the motor area, which is that green stripe, is then instructed to send
instructions to our lips and our tongues to actually make the word. That's how speaking works.
And, as I say, it's natural, those pathways are there already. But reading is a very different kettle
of fish. When we see abstract symbols written down, our brain has to do far more work. It
actually has to, when we are learning to read, we have to create all those new connections in
many, many different parts of the brain. You can see the red bits, or the lit-up bits. You can see
these aren't clear, easy, one-trap pathways. These are really complicated networks that are
being formed in the brain when we read. So, your brain is doing a lot more work, it's connecting
far more parts.
If you like, it's a more holistic experience. It forces you to use parts of the brain that
aren't usually used. More than that, the reason, or one reason why it's so widespread, is that
when we read things about somebody doing something, run for their life or they're screaming or
they're frightened, what happens in the brain of the reader is that those same bits of the brain
that would be active if they were doing it themselves, become active. Admittedly not quite to the
same extent, or we'd act out everything we read, and we can usually inhibit them enough not to
do that, but basically –These are brain scans of people, you can see from the color chart below,
they're reading. The actual movement produces the pattern on your left, and when you're
reading it, what is happening in your brain is the pattern on the right. And as you see, they are
very similar, with the only difference being that when you're reading about things, it's not quite
as intense. If it carried on in intensity, you would act it out. Because the important thing about
reading is that you're not just learning what's going on in that person's head. You, too, to a
certain extent are experiencing it. And there's a very big difference there. It's the same with
everything. With pain –if watch or read about somebody in pain, the same bits of the brain that
would be active if you were feeling the pain will become active as well. And some people feel
this so much that they actually do feel and report the pain. Same with anger, same with any
emotion, same even with quite complicated intellectual things, like judgments, moral judgments,
and so on. Now, this is the new information which has really only come out this year.
Some researchers from Emory University in the States decided to see if they could
actually see inside the brain what was going on. We know already from the earlier work that
people become at least temporarily more sensitive to other people's feelings once they've read
a book or been reading some fiction. And these researchers set out to see if this was something
that could actually be seen inside of the brain, physically. So, they had students, lots and lots, I
think it was quite a large sample, reading a passage of a particularly engaging and exciting
novel with a lot of inside-character driven stuff. It was actually 'Pompeii', by Robert Harris, if you
want to do the same thing yourself. And they had the people read just 30 pages a night for five
nights in a row. And they took brain scans before the people started doing this exercise to get a
baseline of what their brains looked like before. Then they had them read, and every night after
they had read a passage, they came in next morning and they had their brain scanned again.
And every day there were differences. The differences, this is a sort of schematic picture of
where the differences were found, the connections, which as the week went on and they read a
passage each night, they got thicker and denser. And they are, as you see, all over the brain,
not just in the language areas, everywhere.
Basically, what these people seemed to be doing was giving themselves a really good
workout. In fact, the brain scans looked more or less what you'd expect to find if this people had
lived the events that they had been reading about. They had actually lived an experience, and it
had become part of the architecture of their brain. So, in conclusion, I'm really giving the same
message, I think, as Delia, the speaker before, which is that your brain needs a workout as
much as your body. And reading fiction seems to be one of the best workouts you can get. And
not only is it good for you, but it's also good for society as a whole because the brain is like a
muscle: the more you force yourself through books to take other people's perspectives, to
sympathize, to empathize with other people, the more empathetic a society we will have.
Thank you.

How Literature can help us develop Empathy

Greetings from an evangelist for a declining field the study of literature. English majors
like all humanities majors are on the wane until 2011 one-third of the degrees granted from
liberal arts colleges went to the humanities now just one quarter do at research universities
during the same time period degrees and the humanities fell from 17 to 11% what accounts for
this probably practicalities 2011 graduates were choosing their majors in 2008 the recession
given the absurd cost of a college degree who can blame students for choosing more vocational
majors I to have college tuition woes my husband and I have a freshman in college with two
younger children approaching the starting block I too have heard the old joke question what's
the difference between an English major and a park bench answer a park bench can support a
family of four.
So, I get why English majors would be on the decline but you want to know what else is
on the wane empathy a study of over 15,000 college students found that today's students are
40% less empathetic than those in the past today's students are 40 percent less likely to identify
with statements like I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things
look from their perspective there are forty percent less likely to identify with I often have tender
concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me what's the connection well I've spent the
past two decades in the classroom reading readers and what I passionately believe and what
the emerging field of literary neuroscience is beginning to prove is that reading literature makes
us more empathetic our sympathetic or frustrated with Hamlet when he delays avenging his
father's death when Jane Eyre learns Mr. Rochester is already married do we urge her to flee
Thornfield or to stay what we're doing when we're thinking through protagonist actions is we're
judging them against what we would do in the same situation or what we have done in the past
we practice making decisions that have consequences which is to say we practice adulting the
mind-reading we do when thinking through a character educates our emotional intelligence and
this was proven in a study called the reading the mind in the eyes test.
 This study took participants and gave them photographs cropped to reveal only a
subject’s eyes and then gave them four options to choose what emotion that person was feeling
now we're actually going to try that here today I'm gonna ask for a show of hands and the rules
are like this everyone has to vote for one of the four options and anyone who's caught not voting
will be invited on stage to do interpretive dance okay are you ready what is this man feeling
raise your hand for terrified raise your hand for upset raise your hand for arrogance raise your
hand for annoyed this man is upset we're gonna try one more now that you've got the hang of it
look at his eyes what is this man feeling everyone has to vote raise your hand for joking raise
your hand for insisting raise your hand for amused raise your hand for relaxed this man is
insisting if you got both of those right raise your hand and keep it raised for a second everybody
turn to look at those people
Statistically speaking it's likely they are better readers than you are regular readers score
higher on the reading the mind in the eyes test because it's theorized reading allows us practice
taking on another person's perspective it's funny but we have this stereotype of the bookworm
as this paste-eating socially awkward loner but reading improves our social awareness reading
literature helps us read the room well one of my favorite authors is Jane Austen and in one of
my favorite studies students were given Jane Austen to read but not on a couch they read her in
an fMRI machine which detects blood flow change to depict a change in brain activity so paying
attention to the areas of the brain that engage and coordinate when we read gives us a clue to
what's happening when we're reading in this test when the students were reading in the FMR
machine.
Natalie Philips, lead author of the study hypothesized that they'd have increased blood
flow to the areas of their brain responsible for language processing and they did what she
couldn't predict is that they'd have increased global blood flow with blood flowing to areas of the
brain that had nothing to do with language processing say you're reading a book in which a
character is running through the woods well you would expect the temporal lobe the language
processing center of the brain to light up and it does but so does the frontal lobes motor cortex
the area of the brain responsible for coordinating the body events and it lights up in the same
way it would as if you were actually running say you're reading a book in which the protagonist
smells lavender or vanilla or coffee again you would expect the temporal lobe to light up and it
does but so does the olfactory bulb and it lights up in the same way it would as if you were
actually smelling those scents this doesn't happen with fact-based nonfiction it doesn't happen
with movie reviews political journalism Ikea bookcase assembly manuals that manual might
result in a cool bookcase but if you want to light up your brain like fireworks on the fourth of July
stock that bookcase with Jane Austen is it all in our heads is there any practical application for
the increased brain connectivity that reading induces
What if I told you that thinking through a protagonist action could make you less racist
this is what Dan Johnson proved and his study that looks at how reading affects bias, he used
the novel saffron dreams a novel written from the point of view of a Muslim American woman
and he divided the study participants up into two groups the first group was given a three-
thousand-word excerpt of saffron dreams in which this Muslim American woman was the object
of racial prejudice this second group got a 500 word synopsis of that excerpt so this synopsis
maintained all the facts but it left out all the sensory imagery and metaphors and rich interior life
of the character the stuff that really makes a novel come alive afterwards the study participants
were presented with faces of ambiguous Arab Caucasians some of those faces appeared angry
and the study participants were asked to identify the race of the people in the photograph those
who'd read that shorter 500 word synopsis were disproportionately likely to characterize the
angry faces as Arab this racial bias was absent among those who dread the lush transporting
excerpt children too can improve their opinions about stigmatized groups through reading and
this was proven in a study that used Harry Potter this was done in Italy where immigrants are a
stigmatized group
So, the children were divided into two groups the control group read the passage in
which Harry gets his wand and the other group read a passage in which shockingly blond
pureblood Draco Malfoy is rude to Hermione, Anna calls her a filthy little mud blood one week
later the children's attitudes were assessed and those who'd read the passage dealing with
racial prejudice had improved attitudes towards immigrants again I think of the students who
come to visit me and my office and the English department wanting maybe to be an English
major but wanting to be successful well if what they mean by successful is the highest
guaranteed starting salary maybe I do need to point them to the slightly bigger and more robust
columns of Business Administration but if what they're talking about is helping to create a more
harmonious worlds pull up a chair some people play fantasy football I like to play fantasy fiction
seminar and my draft picks are those most in need of the enhanced brain connectivity that
reading induces namely world leaders and policy makers.
Imagine if before initiating aggressive military action that leader had to read a novel from
the point of view of an enemy combatant, imagine if before slashing social services that
Legislature had to inhabit the interior life of a welfare queen imagine if before setting a prison
sentence or immigration policy that politician had to pass my midterm I've been talking about the
wave reading educates us emotionally cognitively and spiritually but I want to end with what it
does for us hedonistic aliy don't just read because it's good for you read because it's good it
tastes good to suck a novel sweet juice and reading not only helps us feel it helps us feel that
reading makes us less lonely we can find our own stories and books James Baldwin wrote you
think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world and then you
read we could start today we could go home and turn off the phone and turn on a book we could
lose ourselves which is to say find ourselves and find everybody else while we're at it and I'll let
you in on a little secrets but don't tell the incoming students you don't even need to be an
English major but if you happen to be considering it you know where to find me my office in the
English department or maybe outside on a park bench you know the kind that can support a
family of four or just one English major
Thank you very much!