Reading fiction and your brain

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, have found in their studies that readers of fiction have a more developed “theory of mind”. Theory of mind is the ability to recognise that you and others have all sorts of beliefs, and that those beliefs can differ from each other. This is important if we’re to be successful in our social interactions. These effects appear in what is called “deep reading”, which is found when reading books but not found when reading an article online for example.

In January 2014, in another study, published in the scientific journal Brain Connectivity titled ‘Short and Long Term Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain’ researchers showed that the brain is changed in traceable and apparently persistent ways by stories.