How fiction reading may improve your character

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that describes the atrocities of slavery, visited with Abraham Lincoln in 1862. "So, you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war," he reportedly said to her upon greeting her, acknowledging the novel's contribution to the abolitionist movement and the igniting of the Civil War. It has long been believed that novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin helped bring about significant social changes. However, this kind of acknowledgment subtly implies that reading fiction has the power to transform individuals. And developing readers' empathy is one way to bring about this shift.

Nowadays, most people view empathy as a virtue, which is the ability to first recognize, then comprehend, and finally experience another person's emotions. Philosophically speaking, however, there is a small knowledge problem that makes having empathy by nature difficult. Why? "Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced," as poet John Keats once said. How, then, can we ever make someone else's feelings and point of view seem genuine enough for us to grow in empathy? Fiction reading might offer a solution. According to research, fiction books can serve as powerful instruments for fostering empathy by providing us with the closest thing to firsthand knowledge of another person's experience.

You can put yourself in other people's shoes by reading fiction.
Reading fiction boosts blood flow throughout the brain in addition to activating the temporal lobe, according to studies, especially those by Natalie M. Phillips. It stimulates the olfactory bulb and other parts of the brain related to sensory experiences, as well as the motor cortex. To put it another way, reading fiction causes the brain to light up in ways that resemble the neuronal activity of the experience it describes. For instance, your brain responds as though you are actually wandering through the woods when you read a well-written paragraph about a character. The area of your brain that becomes active when you taste anything sour lights up if you read a chapter about a character sipping lemonade. You may even begin to salivate.Reading fiction allows you to experience other people's experiences to a certain extent, which brings you one step closer to the brain comprehension required for empathy. It's much less eerie than those body-swapping movies, but it's still a long way from waking up as someone else.

Reading fiction makes you more useful.
You can also cultivate your nicer side by reading literature. Participants who claimed to have been "transported" by a fictional story showed both enhanced empathy and helpful behaviors, according to a few studies. People who were captivated by a story, for example, were more inclined to pick up pens that a researcher "accidentally" dropped, according to one study. They were more likely to request more details about a charity, according to another survey.Participants who read nonfiction and those who read fiction but said they weren't very interested in it, on the other hand, showed fewer of these tendencies.However, isn't it possible that helpful people enjoy reading fiction? Another study explicitly examined lifetime exposure to fiction vs the immediate sense of being engrossed in a story in order to rule out that possibility. The ability to share another person's feelings and emotions, or "affective empathy," was found to be positively correlated with the immediate experience. Additionally, it supported research showing that immediate helpful behavior is uniquely predicted by affective empathy.

But even if lifelong fiction reading was positively connected with cognitive empathy, which is the capacity to see the world from another person's perspective and deduce their intents and beliefs,wasn't always connected to helpful actions. Put another way, reading fiction appears to align with present-moment helpful dispositions.

Gaining the ability to read the room
In order to truly develop empathy, you must become more introspectively conscious of and connected to those around you. And once more, reading fiction is linked to precisely this ability. In one study, readers' results on the traditional "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" (MIE) test were compared. This exam evaluates a person's capacity to infer another person's feelings just from their facial expressions. It is also seen as a test of one's theory of mind, or the capacity to deduce the intentions, beliefs, and mental states of others.

According to the findings, readers of fiction outperformed both nonfiction and nonreaders in terms of scores.The researchers postulated that reading fiction enhances social awareness by giving you the opportunity to practice adopting another person's viewpoint. Research indicates that reading literary fiction enhances one's theory of mind and emotional intelligence even outside of the MIE test. According to the translation of these research, reading fiction can make people more perceptive, sympathetic, and sensitive to emotions. For example, they will find it simpler to recognize when a friend or loved one is unhappy, enabling them to respond appropriately without exacerbating the problem.

The story's lesson
The lesson to be learned is easy: Try reading more fiction more frequently if you want to develop empathy in your relationships and in your life. This is especially true of fiction written by and about individuals whose lives differ from your own. Although you cannot physically live another person's life, you may, in the words of postmodern author Samuel Beckett, "fail better" at the objective of comprehending their experiences since developing a fiction reading habit can improve your emotional intelligence and empathy. And it's a rather easy, even fun, way to become more like the Black Panthers and Harry Potters and less like the world's Voldemorts and Killmongers.