Heroes Not Zombies

I’m a great fan of stories. In fact, I think we understand ourselves and others by using narrative, and the central way in which I work as a doctor is to hear people’s stories, and help them to change them from stories of being stuck or in chaos, to stories of flow, and flourishing and growth.

I’m also a great fan of fiction and the importance of the imagination. I vividly remember Ian McEwan writing this, about this day, ten years ago…

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

So, this recent article in the Guardian caught my eye, “Reading fiction improves empathy, study finds”. There are a number of studies described in this article, and it’s introduced me to something called “the pyschology of fiction”, and, specifically to the work of Keith Oatley. If I wasn’t so insatiably curious I wouldn’t keep finding these amazing new worlds to explore! One of the studies described in the article compared the effects of reading Harry Potter with the effects of reading Twighlight. They used a new measure – “Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective Assimilation Scale”! Don’t you love that? Look at this conclusion from that research –

“The current research suggests that books give readers more than an opportunity to tune out and submerge themselves in fantasy worlds. Books provide the opportunity for social connection and the blissful calm that comes from becoming a part of something larger than oneself for a precious, fleeting moment,” Gabriel and Young write. “My study definitely points to reading fulfilling a fundamental need – the need for social connection,”

and read this fascinating comment by Keith Oatley

“I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world,” said Oatley. “The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. We usually take the exterior view of others, but that’s too limited.”

Spot on. He really nails the importance and value of fiction as a tool for building empathy. We reduce the place of the Humanities in our education system at our peril!