Transcription
Translator: RQUIA BOUCHTA
Auditor: Hussain Laghabi
If I came and told you that there is one thing you can all do which will make you more creative, will make your memory better, perhaps improve your personal relationships, and make you kinder people, you would probably be extremely skeptical. Even more so if I said that it costs nothing and that perhaps everyone in this room can actually do it.
Now, you have perhaps guessed that I am talking about reading—there is a clue in the title. But I am not talking about the kind of reading that we all know is extremely important; that is, the kind of reading we do for education, the kind of reading we do for administration, the kind of reading we do nowadays just to get by in life. I am talking rather about fiction, stories, novels—the kind of reading where you read things from inside someone else's head, where it takes you directly inside the emotions, feelings, and actions of the character until you see it from their perspective. This is the kind of reading that is enjoyable at best and at worst often a waste of time.
I mean, I remember my mother telling me that she was obsessed with books when she was a child, but her father once snatched a novel from her hands, saying, "If you have to read, at least read something useful." What I would like to tell you today is that, surprisingly, fiction is indeed extremely useful, in ways we perhaps never expected; in fact, it is more important, perhaps, than any other kind of reading. And I have some new evidence, which comes rather surprisingly from brain science, to support that, which I will come to.
First, some evidence that is not new: In 2013, there was a series of experiments by two psychologists in New York, David Kid and Emanuele Castano. What they did was take people and ask them to read very short passages from different kinds of books. Some were factual books, explanatory or educational books, and some were thrillers, conspiracies, where you read about events happening in a story but not much about the people; it wasn't inside their heads. And the third type was the kind of fiction I am talking about, which is when you read things from the character's own perspective.
Afterwards, the researchers made people look at a set of pictures of people with strong facial expressions of one kind or another, and asked them to make a judgment based on the expressions alone about what they thought was going on in these people's heads. This is actually a standard test for something called "theory of mind," which is a rather unfortunate phrase, I think, for an ability, which I hope we are all familiar with; we all have it to varying degrees. It is the intuitive ability to see, through the way someone moves or expresses themselves, what is going on in their head. It allows us, at least for a moment, to step outside our own heads and see the world for a moment from someone else's point of view. The same ability, incidentally, opens up whole worlds for us because it allows us to imagine what it is like to be somewhere else, to do something else, and to see it in a different way. And so people who do not have it are severely disabled, particularly in social life—they find relationships very difficult—and moreover, they are restricted by a very limited imagination. Because without this ability to step outside your head, it is difficult to imagine anything really.
Now, you don't actually have to look into academic papers to see this effect. We are all familiar with it. I would like to tell you about something specific—a few years ago, I went to a reading group that was for people with various mental health problems. Many of them had severe depression or anxiety, and they got together to start a reading group. I joined them for a few months, when it was already having an effect. The particular meeting I went to, they were reading "Wuthering Heights," the English novel. It had reached a point where Cathy, the heroine, had to choose between marrying either the dull, old Linton or Heathcliff, the exciting, stormy young man. I just wanted to know what they would say.
"Everyone on earth like Linton would be scattered into oblivion before I would consent to give up Heathcliff."
"Stop there, Fay. Do you aspire to the kind of state she is in? Would you like to feel what Catherine is feeling?"
"Absolutely!"
"I want to feel that all the time, and feel this, you know, happy almost all the time, and it can last for weeks, months."
"It's a good idea: for a moment, her tongue says, 'I am Heathcliff,' then you get the feeling that it can be, you know, dangerous too."
"She is marrying someone on flimsy pretenses."
"I can then imagine it from Linton's point of view. Imagine marrying Catherine and then finding out that she loves someone else. And he will, he will find that out."
"I firmly believe she should be with Heathcliff."
"I think she is sexually attracted to him, and the passion."
"Yes."
"Yes."
"And I think she should agree to that." (Laughter)
It seemed to me as I watched and listened to these people that this very simple act of reading fiction had truly changed their lives; in fact, it had saved a life in one case. I know this—as you will probably see at the end, I will get to it.
Now, the question that was on my mind was, what happens in people's minds for them to get this profound effect, this enjoyment? So I wanted to go a little into what happens inside the brain. You may know that our brains are made up of neurons and electrical cells, which connect to each other to form pathways, along which electrical signals travel back and forth endlessly. And this electricity ebbs and flows, and these are our thoughts, our sensations, and our feelings. Some of these pathways are very similar in each one of us because they are actually hardwired into our genes. Here, on the left here, are the pathways we all have that take light from our eyes to the visual cortex, to the back of our heads. On the other side of the frame, you have the connections between the two hemispheres so that each side literally knows what the other side is doing.
Now, I want to show you quickly the difference between speaking and reading because they are very different. Speaking is something, again, that is in our genes, we have these pathways when we are born. All you have to do is put a baby among people who are speaking and it will sooner or later start to do it, it is natural. But reading is not like that. You can put a baby in a library, surrounded by books, from the day it is born, and it will never start to read automatically. It has to be taught how to do it. And that is why we have had speech for at least 100,000 years, enough time for natural selection to make it a fixture in our brains. But reading probably only started 5,000 years ago, and even up to about 100 years ago, most people were not reading at all. So instead of being able to use these pre-wired, intuitive, if you like, pathways all the time, everyone who learns to read has to do it from scratch. And that means creating new pathways, individual pathways, in the way that individuals do everything in their lives. Every time they have an experience they will gain a new memory or a new habit; they create individual pathways, at the top of the master plan. And that is what we have to do when we read.
Quickly, when you look at a speaking brain, it is very simple: if you see a dog, let's say. The information is transmitted to the back of the head, the visual cortex, and then it moves forward. As it moves forward, it picks up memories of what you are looking at until it reaches this blue area, which is the first major language area, there it can put a word to it. Then it jogs back to the adjacent red area, Broca's, and then we remember how to say it. Literally, the motor area, which is this green strip, there it takes on the task of sending instructions to our lips and tongues to make the word a reality. This is how speaking is done. And, as I said, this is natural, these pathways are there beforehand.
But reading is different. When we see abstract written symbols, our brain has to do more work. In fact, it has to do it, when we learn to read, we have to create all these new connections in various different parts of our brain. You can see the red pieces, or the lit-up pieces. You can see that these are not clear, easy, single-track pathways. They are indeed complex networks that are formed in the brain when we read. Your brain is doing a lot of work, it is connecting much larger parts. If you like, it is a more holistic experience. It forces you to use parts of the brain that you do not normally use.
Moreover, the reason, or one of the reasons why it is more widespread, is that when we read about someone doing something, surviving, screaming, or being terrified, what happens in the reader's brain is that the same parts of the brain that would have been active if they were doing it themselves become active. Certainly not to the same degree, otherwise we would be embodying everything we read, and we can usually inhibit them enough not to do that, but essentially—these are brain scans of people, you can see from the color of the chart below, that they are reading. Actual movement leads to the pattern on your left, and when you read it, what happens in your brain is the pattern on the right. And as you can see, they are very similar, with one difference being that when you read about things, it is not to the same intensity. If it were to the same intensity, you would embody it. Because the important thing about reading is that you don't just learn what is going on inside that person's head. You, too, to some extent, live it. And there is a big difference there. The same applies to everything. With pain—if we watch or read about someone in pain, the same parts of the brain that would have been activated if you were feeling pain will also become active. And some people feel this so much that they actually feel the pain and report it. The same with anger, and with any emotions, the same even with very complex intellectual things, like making judgments, moral judgments, etc.
Now, this is the new information that has really come out this year. Some researchers from Emory University in the United States decided to see if they could actually see what was happening inside the brain. We already knew from previous work that people become at least, temporarily, more sensitive to other people's emotions once they have read a book or read some fiction. And these researchers set out to see if something could actually happen inside the brain, really. They had students, many, many, I think it was a very large sample, read a passage from a thrilling and engaging novel with a lot of internal stuff. It was actually "Pompeii," by Robert Harris, if you want to do the same thing yourselves. And people were reading 30 pages every night for five consecutive nights. They took brain scans before people started this exercise to get a baseline of what their brains looked like beforehand. Then they had them read, and every night after they read a passage, they would come in the next morning and their brains would be scanned again. And every day there were differences. The differences, this is a schematic of where the differences were found, the connections, over the course of the week and reading a passage every night, became thicker and denser. And they are, as you can see, all over the brain, not just in the language areas, everywhere. Essentially, it seems that what these people were doing was giving themselves a really good workout. In fact, the brain scans looked more or less like what you would expect to find if these people had lived the events they were reading about. They had actually lived an experience, and it had become part of their brain structure.
And in conclusion, I am passing on the same message really, I think, as Delia, the speaker before, which is that your brain needs training as much as your body does. And reading fiction seems to be one of the best exercises you can get. And this is not only useful for you, but it is also good for society as a whole because the brain is much like a muscle: the more you force yourself through books to adopt other people's perspectives, to empathize, and to tolerate others, the more empathetic society we will have. Thank you. (Applause)