Reading fiction novels makes us better at understanding social cues
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Then he gave everyone two tests. The first used a technique that’s sometimes used to diagnose autism. You are shown lots of pictures of people’s eye areas, and you are asked: what is this person thinking? It’s a way of measuring how good you are at reading the subtle signals that reveal the emotional state of another person. In the second test, you sat down and watched several videos of real people in real situations like, for example, two men who had just played a squash game talking to each other. You had to figure out: what’s going on here? Who won the game? What’s the relationship between them? How do they feel? Raymond and the experimenters knew the real answer – and so they could see who, in the test, was best at reading the social signals and figuring it out. When they got the results, they were clear. The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated – because, reading non-fiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy. I asked Raymond – why? Reading, he told me, creates a ‘unique form of consciousness … While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outwards towards the word on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inwards as we imagine and mentally simulate.’ It’s different from if you just close your eyes and try to imagine something off the top of your head. ‘It’s being structured – but our attention is in a very unique place, fluctuating both out towards the page, towards the words, and then inwards, towards what those words represent.’ It’s a way of combining ‘outwardly directed attention and inwardly directed attention’. When you read fiction in particular, you imagine what it is like to be another person. You find yourself, he says, ‘trying to understand the different characters, their motivations, their goals, tracking those different things. It’s a form of practice. We’re probably using the same kinds of cognitive processes that we would use to understand our real peers in the real world.’ You simulate being another human being so well that fiction is a far better virtual-reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name