Books Are Good For You
For readers, it’s probably no surprise that reading books can be good for our mental health and our relationships with others.
Exactly how is becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain. A study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of MRI brain scans, showed that when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. In other words, we draw on the same brain networks whether we’re reading about hacking our way through the jungle or actually wielding the machete, whether we’re reading about another person’s feelings or trying to guess at them ourselves.
Keith Oatley, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, has run a research group on the psychology of fiction. “We show how identification with fictional characters occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can move us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood,” he wrote in his book, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction.
He also said, “Fiction is a kind of simulation, one that runs not on computers but on minds: a simulation of selves in their interactions with others in the social world … based in experience, and involving being able to think of possible futures.”
For many writers and readers, this makes books the best kinds of friends. They give us a chance to rehearse, or play back, interactions with others in the world without doing any lasting damage, or to place ourselves in situations which we would never experience in real life, but without the dangers that may come with those paths in reality.
Reading allows us to live the lives we wish we could, the lives that we will never actually live—and, often for good reason, lives we dare not live.
I’ve found that writing about those experiences does the same thing. I get to be James Bond—or, by creating and controlling my own world, even God-like. And I get to experience the lives of every character, without the real-world repercussions.
