When I unleash a book onto the world, I imagine it as a fiction-fueled thresher, reaping hearts and leaving a trail of those who laughed, cried, and were changed in its wake. This might seem like a fantasy unto itself, but this metaphor is based not in my own wildest dreams, but in science. A novel is an empathy engine, and an SF/F genre novel is the turbocharged model.
The idea that story can have an effect on the humans that consume it is not new. It’s well accepted across many cultures, and well supported by studies, that children’s development is aided by hearing stories, with benefits ranging from emotional development and improved communication skills to increased vocabulary and social maturity.1 But adults are also affected and changed by story.
Good ol’ Aristotle wrote that the effect of tragedy in Greek dramas on the audience was emotional catharsis. The “terror and pity” that one experienced while watching a Greek tragedy was considered beneficial to the mind and spirit, and in literary critical circles today it’s a common refrain that emotional catharsis is humanizing.2 The underlying idea is that experiencing fear (or other strong emotions) vicariously through story allows a person to process the experience safely, in a way that promotes emotional growth rather than traumatic shutdown.
This relates to a general belief that the arts are good for the soul, and in particular, that art is a liberalizing force. Leftist activist and folk singer Woody Guthrie famously emblazoned this idea on his guitar: This machine kills fascists.3 But philosophy is not fact. We must go searching for proof.
The ability to study directly what goes on in the brain has only come to us in recent decades. When I went to college, I knew I wanted to be a science fiction writer, which made me think that undergrad writing courses—which forbade “genre” fiction—were not going to be useful to my career development. Although I took a few fiction workshop classes anyway, I looked around for what else I could study that would serve me in the future. Lucky for me, my university had just created one new department out of two—Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences—so I was able to both major in linguistics (nominally related to writing) and study all the cutting-edge brain science I thought would come in handy for writing SF—especially cyberpunk, which at the time was the new hotness.
As things have turned out, I’ve written only a smattering of cyberpunk, but studying how the brain works has served me excellently as a writer. It gave me a way to understand people: both characters and readers. Cognitive science studies the nature of thought and consciousness itself, all the way down to the level of molecules passing through cells, making it the bridge between philosophy and neurology, with some psychology and artificial intelligence along the way, and lots and lots of language. (Yeah, yeah, I studied AI before it was cool.) At the philosophical level of linguistics one can ask: is it ever truly possible to know if the meaning in my head is actually transmitted into someone else’s head through words? (Especially when what I’ve said is “I’ll be ready to leave for dinner in a few minutes” but what my partner heard was “time to squeeze in one more video game”?)
A few decades ago, linguistic philosophers would have said no, there’s no way to prove that your meaning was transmitted: the best you can do is build up enough experience talking to other humans that you feel certain a reasonable approximation of shared meaning is reached. But that was when all we could look at was the results of the conversation, because there wasn’t a way to peer inside the mechanism. Then along came fMRI4, which allows us to see various areas of the brain activating in real time. While there’s still no way to truly “prove” that meaning is accurately transmitted, it’s a huge piece of evidence to see human brains at work. Especially when ample studies have shown that when one person tells a story and another one listens, the activity in the brain of the listener gradually adjusts until it matches the brain activity of the storyteller. The phenomenon has been termed “neural coupling,” which sounds like science fiction but is a truly delicious science fact.5
This also means when someone gives a really good TED Talk—or sermon—the people in the audience (assuming they’re paying attention and not doomscrolling) are all coupling to the speaker and having some baseline of a common experience. Cool, yes? But having a conversation or attending a talk are real-time auditory communications. What about reading, which is neither?
As a fiction writer, of course, I can never be sure if my “meaning” is being gleaned by the reader. Unlike with spoken communication, with writing, the feedback loop is much, much slower, making it more difficult to course-correct. But even apart from the basic message carried on the surface of words, fiction communicates on multiple levels, and an author’s intended meaning might not be the message that comes through. A mutual of mine on social media recently wrote of Robert Heinlein that “he was trying very hard to envision an equal society and failing miserably because of unexamined assumptions.”6 This is a fine encapsulation of why a bi boyfriend of mine had received positive affirmations about queer identity as a teen when reading Heinlein, while all I saw was a whole lotta white patriarchy. As an author myself I know my subconscious is constantly hiding meanings in my work that I didn’t consciously intend…but that is the nature of fiction itself. We always betray ourselves because our souls can be glimpsed through the words, whether we like it or not.
But authorial intent aside, we shouldn’t forget that the reader is half of the equation. I was on a panel once with author Sam J. Miller (Blackfish City, The Art of Starving) who introduced me to the idea that reading is a form of performance art. The words on the page are the script, and each reader, like an actor, must create their own interpretation. Their prior experiences, knowledge, and traumas shape that interpretation, completely independent of the writer’s input. The reader isn’t just an actor, though: they’re the entire movie crew, creating the scenery, casting the extras, you name it. Reading is a workout for the brain, even when one is reading “escapist” fiction.
No, not “even when,” I meant “particularly when.” There’s this persistent but incorrect notion that if fiction is “escapist,” it’s the equivalent of junk food for the mind—as if escapism rots the brain the way candy rots teeth. Really, it should be patently obvious that fiction that invites one to escape from dreary reality is MORE work for the brain, not less, and the further from reality, the more one works. Being transported to unfamiliar settings, as science fiction and fantasy necessarily do, requires more of the reader. This work makes the fictional world feel even more immersive to the reader: of course it does, because the reader had to expend so much effort to create that world in their own mind.
So, the question now becomes, is a reader who is creating their own immersive experience of a fictional story as affected as someone who experiences neural coupling while listening to a storyteller? The short answer is yes. In fact, the effect of fiction is more pronounced and longer lasting than nonfiction, and close, immersive reading has a measurably stronger effect than superficial reading. Researcher Natalie Phillips entered the field from the literary side a little over a decade ago. As a scholar of Jane Austen, she had designed an experiment to watch the brainwaves of people as they read Austen.7 One group was instructed to skim-read as they might while browsing the book on a bookstore shelf, while another group was instructed to do focused, deep reading as if preparing to write a critical essay. Neuroscientists at her university told her to expect to see only subtle differences between the groups, but their prediction was quite wrong. During close reading, Phillips observed subjects’ brains lighting up in the areas that correspond to movement and touch. Their brains were reacting as if the readers themselves were in the scenes they read. Immersed.
An entire field of literary neuroscience has since blossomed. Many, many studies have since been conducted showing that when immersed in reading fiction, our brains react as if what is happening to the characters is happening to us, and in particular that our emotions get a workout. (Aristotle must feel so smug.) The emotional workout itself, though, isn’t the end of the story. The question wasn’t just whether stories can make readers feel things: it was about whether art can be a liberalizing force.
As it turns out, we now have studies that show, for example, that immediately after being immersed in fiction, readers feel and behave more empathetically than those who read a piece of nonfiction.8 Several studies have identified “transportation,” as key, defined thus: “transportation into a story occurs when an individual is fully engaged, experiences high imagery, and is emotionally impacted by the story.”9 The empathetic effect has also been measured as more long-lasting in fiction readers, with some studies showing that lifelong habitual fiction lovers demonstrate better empathy and prosocial behavior overall than non-readers or readers of non-fiction.10
I’m barely scratching the surface of the research that’s out there because this essay would turn into a master’s thesis if I tried to do a full literature review. (Don’t tempt me.) The point is the notion that fiction humanizes us and makes us better people isn’t just wishful thinking; it’s supported by the data.
I used to believe that the problem with right-wing conservatives was that they lacked imagination. I thought they feared change because they couldn’t imagine what life could be like if things were different. I was naïve. If you look at any conspiracy website you will find they have highly detailed fantasies about everything from microchips in vaccines to space lasers. This led me to believing, for a while, that their trouble was that they couldn’t tell fact from fiction. (No, that’s the problem with generative AI.) I thought that if only they had as much practice with moving between the real world and fantasy worlds as readers of genre fiction, maybe they’d come around. But now I realize the problem was never about shunning “fantasy” per se, but lack of empathy.
Right-wing conservative parents are up in arms over books now, and they’ve taken the culture war right to the public libraries and classrooms. They believe that books will lead their children to love each other rather than obey their parents and to value cooperation over competition. They fear that books will expand their children’s worldview.
The people who are banning and burning books across the United States right now believe that stories are dangerous to their ideology.
Science shows they are right.
1“Effects of storytelling on the childhood brain,” Miyuki Yabe, et. al, Fukushina Journal of Medical Science, National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6305786/.
2“Catharsis,” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/art/catharsis-criticism.
3“Music, like culture, has the power to defeat right-wing extremists and their antidemocratic ideas rooted in xenophobia, racism, homophobia and sexism.” Fernando Navarro, “Why Woody Guthrie’s guitar was a killer of fascists,” El País (English Edition), July 21, 2023. https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-07-21/why-woody-guthries-guitar-was-a-fascist-killer.html.
4“Functional MRI (fMRI),” Cleveland Clinic, https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diagnostics/25034-functional-mri-fmri.
5Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson, “Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication,” PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), July 26, 2010, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1008662107.
6@rahaeli.bsky.social, Bluesky social media post, accessed Dec 10, 2023, https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3kdhppff2j22v.
7Helen Thompson, Shankar Vedantam, “A Lively Mind: Your Brain on Jane Austen,” NPR.org, October 9, 2012. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/10/09/162401053/a-lively-mind-your-brain-on-jane-austen.
8P. Matthijs Bal, Martijn Veltkamp, “How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation,” PLOS ONE, January 30, 2013, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0055341.
9Dan R. Johnson, “Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions,” Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 52, Issue 2, January 2012, Pages 150-155, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691100451X?via%3Dihub.
10John Stansfield, Louise Bunce, “The Relationship Between Empathy and Reading Fiction: Separate Roles for Cognitive and Affective Components,” Journal of European Psychology Students, Volume: 5 Issue: 3, July 14, 2014, https://jeps.efpsa.org/articles/10.5334/jeps.ca.
© 2024 Cecilia Tan
