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#Thebrain for characters series
#Thebrain for characters windows

But the authors of the study took into account people’s scores for empathy and found that, regardless, those who were most transported by the story behaved more altruistically. You might be wondering whether the people who cared the most about the characters in the story were the kinder people in the first place – as in, the type of people who would offer to help others. It worked: the people who felt the most transported by the story and expressed the most empathy for the characters were more likely to help retrieve the pens. The experimenters then said they needed to fetch something from another room and, oops, dropped six pens on the way out. Did they have a vivid mental picture of the characters? Did they want to learn more about the characters after they’d finished the story?

#Thebrain for characters series

Then they read a short story and answered a series of questions about to the extent they had felt transported while reading the story. Before the pen-drop took place participants were given a mood questionnaire interspersed with questions measuring empathy. People who read novels appear to be better than average at reading other people’s emotions, but does that necessarily make them better people? To test this, researchers at used a method many a psychology student has tried at some point, where you “accidentally” drop a bunch of pens on the floor and then see who offers to help you gather them up.

#Thebrain for characters windows

We don’t wet ourselves with terror or jump out of windows to escape. But we read with luxury of knowing that none of this is happening to us.

When they are in danger, our hearts start to race. In his research, he has found that as we begin to identify with the characters, we start to consider their goals and desires instead of our own. Just as pilots can practise flying without leaving the ground, people who read fiction may improve their social skills each time they open a novel. The Canadian cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley calls fiction “the mind’s flight simulator”. This exercise in perspective-taking is like a training course in understanding others. The amazing benefits of being bilingual.

Can reading improve your mental health?.

Without necessarily even noticing, we imagine what it’s like to be them and compare their reactions to situations with how we responded in the past, or imagine we might in the future. Aristotle said that when we watch a tragedy two emotions predominate: pity (for the character) and fear (for yourself). It’s been credited with everything from an increase in volunteering and charitable giving to the tendency to vote – and even with the gradual decrease in violence over the centuries.Ĭharacters hook us into stories. But can fiction also make us better people? Books can teach us plenty about the world, of course, as well as improving our vocabularies and writing skills. Despite all the other easy distractions available to us today, there’s no doubt that many people still love reading. Every day more than 1.8 million books are sold in the US and another half a million books are sold in the UK.