More to Know: Fiction Lets Us Be More Kylene Beers notes that although nonfiction helps us learn more, fiction lets us be more. Author Neil Gaiman (2013) suggests two profound reasons this might be so. First, for many readers, fiction is the doorway to proficient reading: The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble, and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And we know that avid, voluminous readers possess a deep knowledge of the world as they encounter—through their wide reading—events, people, and issues well beyond the narrow confines of their own lived experience. Second, fiction develops empathy—and there’s research to prove it. Djikic, Oatley, and Moldoveanu (2013) found that their research participants, who were frequent fiction readers, had higher scores on a measure of empathy. The results suggest “a role for fictional literature in facilitating development of empathy.” Again, Gaiman weighs in: Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you … using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a “me” as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed. …You’re also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this: The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different. Indeed, the key point is that we can be different; fiction moves us to change—not just to have a more expansive understanding of the world—but our personal reality. Who would have thought brain scans and fiction could work together to tell a story, but that’s just what cognitive scientist Keith Oatley’s research has done. He explains: Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor, or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories … stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. That’s because our brains are, in a sense, fooled—they aren’t able to differentiate between the fictional experience and the real-life event. What’s more, the social experiences we encounter through a character’s point of view help ready us for social interactions with the real people in our lives:
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